Much ado about was: Why German directly depends on indirect dependency

This paper sets out to challenge the widely held assumption that the Direct Dependency Approach (DDA) is the most suitable analysis for the was-wconstruction 1 in German (1) (Lutz et al. 2000). It presents a clear case in favour of the Indirect Dependency Approach (IDA) (Dayal 1996, 2000), based on hitherto unrecognised syntactic and semantic evidence about the nature and position of the scope marker was as an ordinary wh-argument base-generated in direct object position. The syntactic implications of this proposal will be shown to derive in a straightforward manner.