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Share Paper 3660

Parasitic Gaps in Ditransitives and Antilocality
Karlos Arregi and Andrew Murphy
459-467 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

Since Engdahl's (1983) seminar work, parasitic gaps (PGs) have been a longstanding topic of interest in syntactic theory. While PGs inside adjunct clauses have been relatively well-investigated, far less attention has been devoted to argument-internal PGs. This paper presents a novel observation about argument-internal PGs: in the double object construction, movement of the lower object cannot license a PG in the higher object, whereas a parallel configuration is possible in other ditransitive frames such as the prepositional dative construction. Examination of a wider range of data reveals that there must be a minimal structural distance (namely an intervening maximal projection) between the PG-containing XP and the licensing gap. This generalization follows from the combination of Nissenbaum's (2000) theory of PGs and an Antilocality constraint on movement: the licensing of a PG requires the movement creating the licensing gap to target a position immediately above the PG-containing XP, but this movement violates Antilocality in the double object construction. This illicit configuration can be avoided either by embedding the licensing gap or moving the PG-containing XP. The analysis has important consequences for the theory of successive-cyclic movement and the structure of ditransitives.

Published in

Proceedings of the 39th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Robert Autry, Gabriela de la Cruz, Luis A. Irizarry Figueroa, Kristina Mihajlovic, Tianyi Ni, Ryan Smith, and Heidi Harley
Table of contents
Printed edition: $645.00