Chapter 3 considers how the Principle of Determinacy disallows certain constructions and what options are available to ‘fix’ these ungrammatical structures. Chomsky, Gallego, and Ott (2019) rule out having more than one choice in the workspace/phase, i.e. the workspace must be determinate. If a phrase moves from one position to another in the same phase, i.e. without being transferred/eliminated from the workspace, merge will face the dilemma of which of the two copies will move to a higher position. Determinacy is a third factor formulation of anti-locality and accounts for the Subject Island Condition and the ban on topicalization of the subject. The chapter focuses on how the CP–TP complex makes it hard for syntactic objects to move from the specifier of the v*P to the specifier of TP and then higher, to positions where they check the Q-features. Such a movement results in a that-trace violation. Deleting the C solves this problem and also explains subject-less relative clauses and complementizer-less object clauses in English. Other languages don’t posit a TP and solve the anti-locality problem that way. These languages lack that-trace effects but don’t delete the complementizer.

The that-trace effect is one of several long-distance extraction phenomena that have been the focus of much work in generative syntax. The core pattern, though easily stated, remains a conundrum. It is evident in numbers of unrelated languages, but also appears to vary even in closely related languages. Experimental work that has tested the core contrasts both corroborates and refines them across languages and dialects. We find consistent evidence for the core pattern, as well as a reduction in the acceptability of object extraction over that. Experiments on German have uncovered previously unrecognized subject-object asymmetries, though the relevance to that-trace remains unclear. We also discuss the use of experimental approaches to assess theoretical accounts of the that-trace effect. We conclude with a summary of experimental findings bearing on that-trace and their implications for the general role of judgments in generative theory.

This chapter surveys experimental studies of Germanic languages other than English, including the Scandinavian languages, Dutch, and German. Experimental investigations of the syntax of these languages are mainly of two types. The first type concerns syntactic phenomena that are found both in English and the other Germanic languages. Several phenomena of this type are reviewed in this chapter, including island constraints, the that-trace effect, and superiority. With regard to these phenomena, the major question has been whether syntactic constraints apply in the same way across the Germanic languages, as would be expected given the close relatedness of the Germanic languages. The second type of experimental syntactic research reviewed in this chapter is concerned with syntactic phenomena that are only found in the non-English Germanic languages. These include word-order alternations related to the verb-second property of the non-English Germanic languages and the less rigid word order of the Germanic SOV languages.