Intervention Effects in Palestinian Arabic: How Question Formation Becomes Degraded

Abstract

This paper provides novel results from semantic fieldwork on Palestinian Arabic (PA) on intervention effects. Theoretically, intervention effects can arise in simple and multiple wh- questions, in alternative questions and in scope marking constructions. It will be clarified why this is the case and why PA only exhibits effects in the latter two. Based on the empirical findings, it will be argued that grammaticality is not a binary phenomenon and that intervention effects, rather than turning a grammatical target sentence into an ungrammatical one, downgrade the judgements but do not necessarily make the target sentence ungrammatical. In this sense, intervention effects do exist, but the effect might not be as strong as predicted by the current theory.