PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This paper proposes a pragmatic account of restrictions on extractions from that-complement clauses. For that-complements, it is well known that their transparancy for extraction gets influenced by the matrix verb selecting them: So-called bridge verbs allow extraction from their complement, non-bridge verbs do not. Analysing the different context changes induced by the extraction constructions, an account is developed which proves a violation of very basic pragmatic principles (Searle's 1969 felicity conditions for questions and Grice's 1975 Cooperative Principle (plus Conversational Maxims)) under the occurrence of the negatively influencing factive, implicative and manner-of-speaking verbs. Evidence for an account of this nature in general as well as the particular one proposed in this paper comes from the observation that manipulating contextual factors in the shape of subtypes of the illocutionary force, the questions' intentions and intonational patterns has an impact on the structures' acceptability.