The study of parasitic gap constructions (e. g. these are the reports; which you corrected _; before filing _i) has been a very lively area of research over the last decade. The impetus behind this lies mostly in the margi nality of the construction. Clearly, the intuitions that native speakers have about parasitic gaps do not stem from direct instruction; hence, it is reasoned, such knowledge follows from the restrictions imposed by Universal Grammar. Furthermore, it is unlikely that any principle of Universal Grammar refers specifically to parasitic gap constructions; their syntactic and interpretive properties must instead follow entirely from independent principles. My own interest in the phenomenon was sparked a few years ago, when, in a novel, I came across a sentence like the following: Chait un armateur; dont Ie prestige _; reposait largement sur la fortune _;, 'he was a shipbuilder of whom the prestige was largely based on the wealth'. As the indices indicate, the interpretation of the French sentence is un ambiguous: both the prestige and the wealth necessarily pertain to the same individual. In this aspect, the sentence much resembles the English parasitic gap construction above: in the former case too, the comple ments of correct and file must corefer with the noun phrase heading the relative (the reports). Yet, there is an important difference between the two constructions. Verbs like correct and file subcategorize their com plements.

This book offers a comprehensive survey of research on parasitic gaps, an intriguing syntactic phenomenon. This book offers a comprehensive survey of research on parasitic gaps, an intriguing syntactic phenomenon. The first section of the book contains a history of work on the topic and three fundamental previously published papers. The remaining three sections present new perspectives on the theory of parasitic gaps based on data taken from diverse languages. Contributors Michael Calcagno, Peter W. Culicover, Elisabet Engdahl, Robert Hukari, Andreas Kathol, Christopher Kennedy, Katalin É. Kiss, Robert Levine, Alan Munn, Jamal Ouhalla, Paul M. Postal, Christine Tellier

This volume presents current research in the formal treatment of linguistic phenomena in the Romance languages. It focuses on a variety of issues in phonology, second language acquisition, semantics, and syntax. Topics in phonological theory include the analysis of geminates, assimilation, rhotics, aspiration, syllabification, the interaction of phonology with morphology, the phonology-phonetics interface, and issues of transderivation and allomorphy selection. The primary question addressed in the area of second language acquisition theory is the issue of learners' access to Universal Grammar. The studies in semantic theory examine the proper analysis of indefinites, bare plurals, and specificity, with a particular emphasis on the syntax-semantics interface. Finally, the essays on syntactic theory discuss issues pertaining to argument structure, functional projections, phrase structure and adjunction, feature checking, and the syntactic representation of tense.

The present work provides a detailed analysis of chain formation and locality conditions imposed on it within the Minimalist Program. It does so by analyzing resumptive strategies in great detail. This study claims that resumptive pronouns and their antecedents are first merged as constituents, and are separated via movement (thus forming instances of discontinuous constituents). Resumptive chains are thus akin to the well-known stranding analysis of quantifier float. A taxonomy of islands is developed that crucially ties barriers for movement to agreement possibilities. The stranding of a resumptive pronoun is shown to limit the role of agreement for the moving element, thereby allowing a chain to be formed across an island.

This monograph investigates A’-dependencies in Standard German, Alemannic and Dutch where the dislocated constituent is indirectly, i.e. not transformationally, related to the position where it is interpreted. The study focuses on relative clauses and shows that an important part of the relativization system in these languages, long relativization, involves a hitherto ignored construction termed resumptive prolepsis. This construction is characterized by base-generation of the operator in the matrix middle-field and a resumptive pronoun in the position of the variable. It is shown that it involves short A’-movement in the matrix clause, empty operator movement in the complement clause and an ellipsis operation that links the two operators. While the link is directly visible in German and Dutch, Swiss German provides a more abstract version of resumptive prolepsis. Through a detailed examination of reconstruction effects and the properties of resumption in these constructions, the book provides new evidence for the role of ellipsis in A’-movement and for a base-generation analysis of resumption. More generally, it makes an important contribution to the modeling of long-distance dependencies and the study of A'-syntax.

This landmark volume is the first work specifically designed to explore the extent to which striking surface morpho-syntactic similarities between Bantu and Romance languages actually represent similar syntactic structures. In particular, it explores the timely and much debated issues of verbal morphology and agreement, the structure of DPs, and word order/information structure, with the goal of providing a better understanding of the structure of the different languages investigated, and the implications this holds for syntactic theory more generally. All of the papers draw on data from both Bantu and Romance languages, providing a framework for much-needed further comparative research on the nature of linguistic structure, its diversity and constraints, and the implications this has for learnability/acquisition. The volume also provides an important precedent for incorporating insights from Bantu linguistic structure into mainstream of syntax research.