Truswell - Events, Phrases & Questions

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Events, Phrases, and Questions


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Events, Phrases, andQuestions

ROBERT TRUSWELL

1


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Robert Truswell

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Contents

General Preface viiAcknowledgements viiiList of Figures and Tables ix

Abbreviations x

. Introduction . Where Were Going . Locality Theory and Extraction from Adjuncts: A Potted History . Further Puzzles . The Plan

Part I. The Structure of Events

. The Variable Size of Events . Variable Pragmatic Coarse-Graining . The Directness of Direct Causation . Aspectual Classes . Summary

. Single Events from Multiple Verb Phrases and the Role of Agentivity

. Events and VP-Coordination

. Relations other than Direct Causation . Agentivity and Event Size . Planning and Enablement . Agentivity, Aspectual Classes, and the Progressive

. Structures Built from Events

. Introduction . The Problems

. Dealing with the Problems . Events and Intervals in Syntax

Part II. Events and Locality

. Where We Stand


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vi Contents

. Extraction from Adjuncts

. Rationale Clauses

.

Prepositional Participial Adjuncts

. Bare Present Participial Adjuncts . Conclusion . Appendix: Preposition Stranding in Adjuncts

. Extraction from Complement Clauses and the Effect of Tense

. On the Impermeability of Tensed Adjuncts . Why Tensed Complements are Different

. Factive Islands and Event Structure . Cyclic Determination of Event Structure . What Has Happened to the CED? . Summary

. Architectural Issues

. Introduction . Could We Syntacticize the Single Event Grouping Condition?

. Integrating Syntactic and Semantic Constraints on Movement . Conclusion

. Conclusion

References

Author Index

Subject Index


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General Preface

The theoretical focus of this series is on the interfaces between subcomponentsof the human grammatical system and the closely related area of the interfacesbetween the different subdisciplines of linguistics. The notion of interface hasbecome central in grammatical theory (for instance, in Chomskys recent Min-imalist Program) and in linguistic practice: work on the interfaces between

syntax and semantics, syntax and morphology, phonology and phonetics etc.has led to a deeper understanding of particular linguistic phenomena and ofthe architecture of the linguistic component of the mind/brain.

The series covers interfaces between core components of grammar,including syntax/morphology, syntax/semantics, syntax/phonology, syntax/pragmatics, morphology/phonology, phonology/phonetics, phonetics/speechprocessing, semantics/pragmatics, intonation/discourse structure as well asissues in the way that the systems of grammar involving these interface

areas are acquired and deployed in use (including language acquisition, lan-guage dysfunction, and language processing). It demonstrates, we hope, thatproper understandings of particular linguistic phenomena, languages, lan-guage groups, or inter-language variations all require reference to interfaces.

The series is open to work by linguists of all theoretical persuasions andschools of thought. A main requirement is that authors should write so as tobe understood by colleagues in related subfields of linguistics and by scholarsin cognate disciplines.

David AdgerHagit Borer


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Acknowledgements

This is a substantially revised version of my dissertation, Truswell (b).Everyone who was thanked in is hereby thanked for a second time. Inparticular, the input of Ad Neeleman as supervisor of that dissertation, andof Jack Hoeksema and David Adger as examiners, remains just as valuable.Since, portions of this material have been presented at Tufts, MIT, UMass

Amherst, Harvard, and Edinburgh. Thanks to all those audiences for theirinput. Many of the refinements of this work over Truswell (b) have theirroots in conversations in the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University,in particular with Ray Jackendoff. I doubt anyone there agrees with much ofthis, but I am grateful to them for making me think about topics that hadnever crossed my mind before.

Thanks also to all the informants who have discussed these data withme: Peter Ackema, Daniel Altshuler, Kristine Bentzen, Anna Cardinaletti,

Francesca Filiaci, Raffaella Folli, Vera Gribanova, Ger de Haan, ZakarisHansen, Ana Carrera Hernandez, Jack Hoeksema, Eric Hoekstra, AndersHolmberg, Lars Jensen, Vikki Janke, Akis Kechagias, Hans van de Koot, BjrnLundquist, Ad Neeleman, ystein Nilsen, Katya Pertsova, Matthew Reeve,Aglaya Snetkov, Goutta Snetkov, Vladimir Snetkov, Alyona Titova, Nikos Vele-grakis, Reiko Vermeulen, and Olga Yokoyama.

It will be clear to anyone familiar with the literature that two works reallyshould have been cited more than they are in this text, namely JackendoffsSemantic Structures() and Bridget Copleys () MIT dissertation. I canonly apologize for the omission.

This research was originally carried out with the support of a studentshipfrom the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and a Wingate Scholarship.The revisions as this research makes the transition from thesis to monographhave been supported by a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship.


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List of Figures and Tables

Figures.. The maximal core event

.. A TOTE unit

.. Hammering a nail into a wall, in TOTE units

.. Still from Wolffs Experiment: all force-dynamically related objects

are inanimate. (Figures..are reprinted fromCognition,Phillip Wolff, Direct causation in the linguistic coding andindividuation of causal events, pp.,, Copyright (), withpermission from Elsevier.)

.. Still from Wolffs Experiment: the initial element in the causal chainis animate

.. Still from Wolffs Experiment: the initial element in the causal chainis animate, and intends to bring about the goal event

.. Still from Wolffs Experiment: the initial element in the causal chainis animate, but does not intend to bring about the outcome of thecausal chain

.. The maximal core event

.. Extended events

Tables.. Processing costs associated with a single-event reading of the sentence

What did John arrive whistling?

.. Processing costs associated with a multiple-event reading of thesentenceWhat did John arrive whistling?


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Abbreviations

First person

Second person

Third person

Set A affix, third person (Tzotzil)

Accusative case

Adverbial form

AP Adjective phrase

BPPA Bare Present Participial Adjunct

C Complementizer

CCG Combinatory Categorial Grammar

CED Condition on Extraction Domain

Conj Conjunction Completive aspect

CSC Coordinate Structure Constraint

Dative case

DP Determiner phrase

DRS Discourse Representation Structure

DRT Discourse Representation Theory

ECP Empty Category PrincipleGB Government and Binding theory

GPSG Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar

HPSG Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar

H Head (syntactic category unspecified)

HP Maximal projection (syntactic category unspecified)

Incompletive aspect

Infinitive

INFL Inflection

IP Inflectional phrase

LCA Linear Correspondence Axiom


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Abbreviations xi

LF Logical Form

Masculine gender

Neuter gender Nominative case

NP Noun phrase

OSV ObjectSubjectVerb order

OVS ObjectVerbSubject order

P Preposition

P&P Principles and Parameters theory

Passive

PF Phonological Form

PP Prepositional phrase

Subjunctive

Singular

SOV SubjectObjectVerb order

Spec SpecifierSVO SubjectVerbObject order

t Trace

T Tense

TP Tense Phrase

UTAH Uniformity of Theta-Assignment Hypothesis

V Verb

VOS VerbObjectSubject orderVP Verb phrase

VSO VerbSubjectObject order

X, Y Head (syntactic category unspecified)

XP, YP Maximal projection (syntactic category unspecified)


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1

Introduction

. Where Were Going

This book has two aims. The first is to propose a theory of what certainconceptual units in semantic structures look like. There is a fair consensusabout what sorts of primitive elements we need to make our semantics workas a model of the way humans talk and understand each other. We need someindividuals, the basic concrete or abstract things in the world that we talkabout when we talk. Things happen to individuals, individuals do things, anda large part of what natural language does is establish or manipulate a set ofrelations among individuals. We probably also need somestuff(often called

masses), the badly-behaved material which is not individuated like individualsare but which still participates in the same sort of relations that individualsparticipate in. Individuals are generally composed of stuff, but stuffneednot correspond to any well-defined individual. We also need some events,individuated occurrences in which indviduals and portions of stuffdo thingsto each other and to other elements of our semantic structures. These eventsmay or may not be different fromstates, which are more atemporal relationsholding among one or more other units. Events are definitely different fromwhat I will callhappenings(which Bachcalledprocesses). As Bach argued,events relate to happenings in the same way as individuals relate to stuff.

When we move beyond that, into the realm of what Asher () calledabstract objects, there is rather less agreement. We almost certainly need some

propositions, which are things that some individuals believe, express, and holdother attitudes towards. These may be different fromfacts, which look a lot likepropositions but, on Ashers account, can make individuals do things. And so

on. And then there are timesanddegreesand all sorts of other, more exoticbuilding blocks. The same sort of lists occur in work after work, allowing forvariation among authors in how ontologically austere they are.

One area where researchers have generally had less to say, however, concernshow to recognize these units. This is true even if we stick to regular, concreteindividuals we can touch and see, and ignore trickier abstract or fictional


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Introduction

individuals. We all agree on the basic cases, where the batter is an individualand the baseball is an individual, and the stuffthat makes up the batter is stuff,as is the stuffthat makes up the baseball, and the batter hitting the ball is anevent, and the happenings that the batters hitting the ball are composed ofare happenings, and so on. But, for each of these clear cases of packaging ofcontinuous stuffand happenings into discrete individuals and events, thereare more marginal examples where it is unclear whether we are dealing withan individual (or event) or not.

This problem is far from new, of course. It preoccupied many Gestalt psy-chologists, among others. Wertheimer framed the problem eloquently:

I stand at a window and see a house, trees, sky.Theoretically I might say there were brightnesses and nuances of colour. Do I

have? No. I have sky, house, and trees. It is impossible to achieve as such.(Wertheimer:)

And Koffka made a similar point:

Think for a moment what happens to a retinal element while your eyes roam around

as they continually do: in quick succession, and without any order whatsoever, thiselement will be stimulated now by white light, now by greenish light; one moment thestimulation will be strong, the next very weak; green will be followed by red or blue, akaleidoscopic change. And what corresponds to this whirl of stimulation of the retinalpoints? A perfectly steady and orderly world; the cigarette box on my desk remains acigarette box, the calendar a calendar, while my eyes move along. (Koffka:)

The observation can be posed equally acutely for events: why is it that we seethe hitting of a baseball as the hitting of a baseball rather than a series of undif-

ferentiated movements? The outline of the Gestalt psychologists answer is thatperception is organization (Koffka : ), that is, perception is a processin which, at least, [u]nits are. . .formed and maintained in segregation andrelative insulation from other units (Koffka : ). This is precisely thepackaging referred to above.

However, this fundamental insight, that the units we manipulate are reifiedas part of the process of perception rather than given by some inherent orga-

nization of the external world, leads to a second question: What are the prin-ciples according to which we organize our perceptual environment into thesesegregated, insulated units? The aforementioned works tackled this problem,as it applies to the perception of individuals, in terms of a series of lawsof organization, and a general condition, the Law of Prgnanz, which statesthat psychological organization will always be as good as the prevailingconditions allow.


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Where Were Going

An initial focus of this book is on the related questions that arise in theperception of events. Here, too, the organization of the continuous happen-ings into discrete units is clearly part of the process of perception rather thansomething given in the external world. Consider a ball flying through the airand a person running on the ground. If these two occurrences are taken to beindependent of each other, they will probably be considered as two separateevents, but if we attribute to the person an intention to catch the ball, thenwe may suddenly be inclined to consider the two occurrences jointly as a singleevent of the person chasing after the ball. This shows that eventhood, too, isin the eye of the beholder, and that our perception of certain happenings as a

single event is contingent on all sorts of relations between that event and otherhappenings, and among subparts of the happenings themselves. The first taskin this book, to be undertaken in Part I, is to present a theory of those relationsamong events. Under what circumstances are we willing, or likely, to considera set of happenings as a single event?

However, as this is primarily a work about language, we will shift theemphasis of the previous question somewhat, to consider thedescriptionofstuff that happens. If perception is organization, then an individuals dis-

courses about the real world will inevitably reflect the organization that resultsfrom that individuals perceptual processes. Instead, then, we will ask this:Under what circumstances are we willing, or likely, to describe a set of hap-penings (or accept as accurate a description of a set of happenings) as a singleevent?

In slightly more formal terms, the sorts of algebraic structures proposed ini-tially for the domain of individuals by Link (), and then for events by Bach(), allow us to consider, for any two events, a larger single event composed

solely of those twosubevents. We want to know under what circumstances weare likely to actually exercise that option, or conversely, when two events justdo not feel like a single larger event.

The answer proposed here goes some way beyond the usual linguisticcharacterization of events, based primarily on the event variable of Davidson(). I will adopt a version of what Pietroski (: ) describes as a non-Cartesian form of dualism. That is, without subscribing to the Cartesian

distinction between the physical and the mental, I will claim that mentalprocesses, and in particular intention, have a special status in our organizationof happenings into events. This does not mean that the mental actually is dif-ferent from the physicalI need not care what the mental and the physicalactuallyare. Rather, all I claim is that, when we perceive some happeningsas corresponding to an agents intention, that affects the way in which weorganize those happenings into events.


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Introduction

More specifically, behaviour perceived as intentional, planned, or agentive,allows the formation of larger perceptual units than would otherwise be pos-sible. I suggest with Fodor () and Wolff() that, in the absence ofperceived intention, a major factor in the organization of happenings intoevents is direct (sometimes calledballistic) causation. If some property of anobjectxcauses some change of state in another objecty, with no intermediary,then we perceive a single event, and we use a single event description todescribe what happens. That is why we can saythe falling tree destroyed thecarto describe a series of blind, mechanical changes in which a strong windblows a tree over, and the tree happens to land on a car, crushing it. On the

other hand, if some intermediate cause is apparent (for example, the strongwind blows a heavy tree over, the tree lands on one end of a seesaw, on theother end of which is a-tonne weight, which is launched onto a car, crushingit), then we are less willing to describe the series of happenings with thesentence the falling tree destroyed the car. Once intention is involved, though,the requirement of direct causation is much less clearly felt. I can truthfullyclaim thatI destroyed the carif I (with my heavy friends) jump on the end ofa see-saw, sending a -tonne weight flying onto the car. However, accepting

such a description requires attribution of intention (or at least some form ofresponsibility) to me: if I was dropped, unconscious, onto the see-saw, andthe same consequences ensued, the claim thatI destroyed the carsounds, if notcompletely false, at least tenuous.

Part I, then, is concerned with the elaboration of a theory of the per-ception and description of events which takes account of the special sta-tus of intention. After this, Part II applies this theory to a recalcitrant andapparently unrelated problem in syntax, namely patterns of extraction out

of adjuncts, primarily in English. As we will see presently, there are twomajor positions among theoretical syntacticians on the status of adjunctsas locality domains. Neither is very satisfying in isolation, because one ofthem (the claim that adjuncts are strong islands) rules out too many casesof extraction from adjuncts and one of them (the claim that adjuncts are weakislands) doesnt rule out enough. And although it is impossible to constructa negative proof in cases like this, I hope to show that the prospects are

bleak for attempts to find a more empirically satisfying pure-syntax story ofthis area.In such cases, the best approach is often to adopt the overly permissive

position, and look for a supplementary constraint to rule out the cases thatsuch an analysis in isolation predicts to be acceptable. In the case of extractionfrom adjuncts, the supplementary theory I propose is based on the analysisof events. The major hypothesis is, roughly, that movement is only possible


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Where Were Going

when the minimal constituent containing the head and the foot of the chaindescribes no more than one event.

Even at this early stage, two consequences hopefully stand out. Firstly, thismeans that the theory of events developed in Part I is not just a theory ofwhat some of our basic perceptual units look like. Rather, the shape of such atheory has consequences for empirical areas usually considered part of corelinguistic theory, such as syntactic locality. Secondly, we have some majorarchitectural issues to confront. The theory we will arrive at belongs to a classof theories that we may call pluralistic, in that they give semantic structures asubstantial degree of independence from phrase structure and let them carry

a lot of weight in accounting for would-be syntactic facts on partially nonsyn-tactic terms. The present work therefore joins a large, diverse, and growing,body of pluralistic research into A-locality (see Erteschik-Shir, Morgan, Goldsmith , Lakoff , Kuno , Kluender , Szabolcsi andZwarts , Culicover, Kehler, and Culicover and Jackendoff ,to name just a few). Such work contrasts with what Jackendoffand othershave called syntactocentric theories, in which interpretive components, inparticular the semantic component, only minimally modify the structures fed

to them by syntax. Pluralistic accounts of empirical areas like this arguablypush our analyses closer to the minimalist ideal of a stripped-down syntacticmodule which satisfies the substantial constraints imposed by the modules itinteracts with, and does nothing more than that. However, pluralistic theoriesrequire a nontrivial theory of how those modules interact, a problem whichis much less pressing for syntactocentric theories where the LFs generatedby narrow syntax are assumed to map more or less directly into the sort ofstructures interpretable by the semantic component. Such architectural issues

are the concern of Chapter.In the remainder of this chapter, Section.sketches what existing theories

have to say about extraction from adjuncts, and shows that, of the two majorclasses of theories of extraction from adjuncts, there is some truth in each,but that each is also empirically unsatisfying as things stand. Section .thenaims to sow some seeds of doubt about the standard practice of treatingextraction from adjuncts as a primarily syntactic problem, by discussing a

series of puzzling facts about the distribution of extraction from adjuncts.Although I will not attempt to show that the patterns in question cannotbeaccounted for in purely syntactic terms, I will discuss a few ways in whichpatterns of acceptable extraction from adjuncts really do not look like thesort of thing our syntactic locality theories are currently set up to describe.These patterns represent a challenge to anyone pursuing the project of a purelysyntactic account of patterns of extraction from adjuncts: if extraction from


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Introduction

adjuncts is regulated solely by the sort of purely syntactic principles whichregulate extraction from many other types of constituent, why do the patternsof acceptable extraction from adjuncts look as unusual as they do from asyntactic perspective? Finally, Section . sketches the course we intend tofollow in subsequent chapters, where we elaborate an alternative to the purelysyntactic account, which currently stands as the only game in town.

. Locality Theory and Extraction from Adjuncts: A Potted History

Although the notion that adjuncts are islands for extraction is often attributed

to Ross (

), there is no direct discussion of adjuncts as a unified class inRoss thesis. Rather, the claim is first explicitly made in Cattell (). Cattell,as with Chomsky (), attempts to provide a unified account of severalof Ross constraints, in this case the Complex Noun Phrase Constraint, theSentential Subject Constraint, and the Coordinate Structure Constraint. Itappears to be seen as an added bonus, rather than the point of the paper, thathis explanation also rules out extraction from many adjuncts.

The core of Cattells theory is the notion ofsyntactic configuration, which

defines the maximal domains in which operations such aswh-movement canapply.

() A is a maximal sequence of sentoids [whichfor our purposes can be taken to be equivalent to clauses], S1, . . . ,Sn,such that each Si(i = 1) is embedded in the predicate [as opposed tothe subject] of Si1, and is a function of its verband such that nosyntactically required item is lacking in any predicate of the configuration

so formed.

(Cattell:, emphasis removed)Cattell then proposes the following constraint.

() TNP EC. The number and identity of argument-NPs within a syntactic configuration must remain constant under theoperation of movement rules. (Cattell:)

These definitions jointly ensure that movement only occurs within syntacticconfigurations. As syntactic configurations are defined in terms ofpredicate

and function of the verb, extraction from subjects and adjuncts is excluded:from subjects, because subjects are outside the predicate, and from adjuncts,because adjuncts are typically optional, and so not a function of the verb.

There is no comparably concise definition offunction of a verbin Cattells paper, but the basic ideais that if the status of a constituent X as obligatorily present, optionally present, or obligatorily absent,varies from verb to verb, for syntactic reasons, as opposed to, say patterns of semantic incompatibility,then X is a function of the verb.


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Locality Theory and Extraction from Adjuncts

Cattell provides examples like the following to illustrate his claim withrespect to adjuncts:

() (a) John met a lot of girls [without going to the club].(b) *Which club did John meet a lot of girls [without going to ]?

() (a) John wont meet any girls [unless he goes to University].(b) *Which University wont John meet any girls [unless he goes to

]?

() (a) John dated a lot of girls [instead of doing the exams].(b) *Which exams did John date a lot of girls [instead of doing ]?

(Cattell:)

However, Cattell also acknowledges the existence of examples like (), whichinvolve extraction out of an apparently non-subcategorized constituent (thatis, an adjunct), but which are still perfectly acceptable.

() (a) He bought a book [for the girl].(b) The girl that he bought a book [for ] (Cattell:)

Why these examples should diverge from the presumed norm in () is left asan open question, but the impossibility of extracting from an adjunct is takento represent the general case, while examples like () remain recalcitrant(p.) problems.

This assumption remained largely intact, or even became more widelyaccepted, for the next decade or so. In particular, Belletti and Rizzi ()noted that the possibility of ne-cliticization out of objects in Italian (andimpossibility ofne-cliticization out of adjuncts and external subjects) is largelyparallel to the observed data concerning patterns ofwh-movement.

() (a) GianniGianni

ne

ne

trascorrer

will.spend[tre ]

threea

inMilano

MilanGianni will spend three of them in Milan.

(b) * [Tre ]Three

ne

ne

passano

elapserapidamente

rapidlyThree of them elapse rapidly. (Belletti and Rizzi:)

(c) * GianniGianni

ne

ne

isrimasto

remained[tre ]

threea

inMilano

MilanGianni stayed for three of them in Milan.

(Belletti and Rizzi:)

As a convention, I will enclose adjuncts or other relevant locality domains in brackets, andgenerally mark only the position at the foot of the chain with an underscore.


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Introduction

Assuming a movement theory of cliticization, this pattern was accounted forby a revised version of Subjacency, according to which movement across abounding node is only possible if that bounding node is superscripted, in thesense of Rouveret and Vergnaud (). Given that superscripting is used byRouveret and Vergnaud partly as a syntactic indicator of relations between apredicate and its internal arguments, Belletti and Rizzis theory largely repli-cates the empirical predictions of Cattell (), but this time on the basis ofan independently motivated locality condition, namely Subjacency.

Almost simultaneously, the Condition on Extraction Domain in Huang() offered an explanation of the presumed impossibility of extracting out

of subjects and adjuncts, this time more closely related to the Empty CategoryPrinciple than to Subjacency. The Condition is stated as follows, where propergovernment is government by a lexical category:

() A phrase A may be extracted out of a domain B only if B is properlygoverned. (Huang:)

The property of proper government distinguishes complements from finitesubjects and adjuncts. Complements are governed by lexical V, while finite

subjects in English are only governed by nonlexical INFL, and adjuncts arentgoverned by any head. Consequently, the CED not only unifies two appar-ently independent observations about limitations on the domain of appli-cation of movement, as Cattell also did, but also gives a principled accountof why movement is impossible out of specifically these two classes of con-stituents, based on the then-ubiquitous concept of government. As with Bel-letti and Rizzi (), then, the CED not only reinforces Cattells presentationof the facts, but also offers an explanation of why the facts should be that

way.The definition of Subjacency in Belletti and Rizzi () and the CED in

Huang () yield very similar empirical predictions, to the point where it ishard to tease them apart, given the flexibility elsewhere in the general theoryof grammar. One of the ways in which they might differ in principle, though,concerns the treatment of counterexamples. Belletti and Rizzi () was thefirst paper I am aware of which acknowledged a systematic exception to theislandhood of adjuncts, at least in English. The exception in question concernsextraction from the rationale clauses of Faraci (), which is frequentlypossible in English, but not in Italian.

As with Huangs Condition on Extraction Domain, to be discussed immediately below, Bellettiand Rizzi ()s theory does not exactly replicate Cattells empirical predictions, because the twolater theories rely on syntactic properties (superscripting and proper government, respectively) whichare fairly closely related to the notion of internal argument, whereas Cattells theory is based on thesomewhat looser notion of function of the verb.


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() (a) What did John go to New York [to buy ]?(b) * Che cosa

What

isandato

gonea

toNew

NewYork

York[per

for

comprare ]

buy.Gianni?

GianniWhat did John go to New York to buy?

(Belletti and Rizzi:)

Plausibly, the theories considered so far differ in how they would treat suchcounterexamples. Cattell would have to find ways to extend the NP Ecol-ogy Constraint, Belletti and Rizzi to allow exceptional superscripting of suchadjuncts, and Huang to allow proper government to extend to adjuncts insuch cases. The problem faced by Belletti and Rizzi has some similaritiesto the discussion of restructuring in Rouveret and Vergnaud (), whichmay suggest that some method of exceptionally superscripting constituentswould be independently necessary. However, despite many efforts, the theoryof restructuring and reanalysis in the earlys never developed to the pointwhere we could see a testable difference between the theories here.

Belletti and Rizzis discussion of extraction from rationale clauses reflecteda growing recognition that the data concerning extraction from adjuncts aremore equivocal than earlier works might suggest. Firstly, a significant amountof research in the late s and early s (among others, Taraldsen ,Chomsky , Kayne , and Engdahl , although Taraldsen concen-trated in particular on parasitic gaps in subjects rather than adjuncts) doc-umented the existence of a well-defined subclass of at least apparent cases ofextraction from adjuncts in parasitic gap constructions such as ().

() This is a paper that I would reject [without reviewing ].

Whether this represents a genuine case of extraction from adjuncts was atopic of some debate throughout the s, and remains so to some extent.Within the Principles and Parameters literature, where the existence of twodistinct base positions corresponding to a single overt displaced constituentraises acute theoretical issues, evidence was sought that no movement relation

holds between the overt filler and the adjunct-internal gap: either there is adependency, but it isnt created by movement across the adjunct boundary; orthe gap within the adjunct is a trace of movement, but that movement doesnot leave the adjunct island.

Such approaches postulate an asymmetry between the real, island-external,gap, and the parasitic, island-internal gap: the filler originated in the realgap position, and was never in the parasitic gap position. A certain amount


23/278

Introduction

of evidence supporting this asymmetry has been presented. For example,Chomsky () reproduces the following paradigm from Kearney ().

() (a) Which books about himself did John file [before Mary read]?(b) *Which books about herself did John file [before Mary read

]? (Chomsky :)

Himselfis only compatible with the antecedentJohn, accessible only from theisland-external gap site, whileherselfis only compatible withMary, accessibleonly from the island-internal gap site. The contrast between (a) and (b)therefore suggests that reconstruction is possible only into the island-externalgap site. If reconstruction is dependent on a prior movement step, this in turnsuggests that thewh-phrase could only have moved from the island-externalsite.

A handful of similar pieces of evidence have been presented, suggesting thatthe asymmetry predicted by GB approaches is real. However, such evidence ischallenged with some success by Levine and Sag (). Levine and Sag pointout, firstly, that there are cases in which apparent reconstruction into either

island-internal or island-external gap sites is possible, as in (); and secondly,that asymmetries similar to the Kearney paradigm in () can be found incases of across-the-board movement out of coordinate structures (), whichis generally differentiated from parasitic gap constructions. Such pieces ofevidence call into question the empirical support for the predictions of the GBtheory, as opposed to conceivable alternatives in GPSG, HPSG, or CCG, wherethere is less necessity of postulating an asymmetry between the two gaps.

() (a) There were pictures of herself which, [once Mary finally decidedshe liked ], John would have to put into circulation.

(b) There were pictures of himself which, [once Mary finally decidedshe liked ], John would have to put into circulation.

(Levine and Sag:)

() Which pictures of himself/*herself did [[John approve of ] and[Mary like enormously]] (Levine and Sag:)

Two comments are in order here. Firstly, if adjuncts are not completely imper-meable to movement, then the status of asymmetries such as () must berethought: if movement could in principle have originated from either gapsite, we would lose the major motivation for singling out the island-externalgap asthebase position of thewh-phrase. Secondly, even if the evidence givenhere and elsewhere that adjuncts are not strong islands is ignored, the pre-dictions of path-based approaches to locality such as Kayne () are much


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more malleable than those of standard GB. Although data such as those in() may call into question the notion of an asymmetry between the twogaps, then, it does not seriously damage theentireset of GB-era assumptionswhich predicted such an asymmetry, so much as selectively attack some ofthose assumptions.

During the first wave of research into parasitic gaps, Chomsky () dis-cussed examples which should perhaps have had more influence on subse-quent research than they did (see also Levine and Sag ). These wereexamples of extraction from a variety of classes of adjuncts. Chomsky (:) suggests that they range in acceptability from fairly high . . . to virtual

gibberish.

Here are some of the examples he gave.() (a) Here is the influential professor that John went to college [in order

to impress ].(b) The article that I went to England [without reading ](c) The book that I went to college [because I liked ](d) The man that I went to England [without speaking to ]

(Chomsky:)

This was little more than a further acknowledgement of the problem thatCattell had hinted at (Chomsky does not even indicate which of the aboveexamples are fairly acceptable, and which are virtual gibberish). However, itis the first explicit suggestion that it may be fruitful to treat extraction fromadjuncts as a more gradient phenomenon than the essentially binary analysesof Cattell and Huang suggest.

Shortly afterwards (), Kaynes Connectedness theory appeared, present-ing an implicit dissolution of the relationship between subjects and adjunctswhich characterizes all of the above work. This is because Connectedness isbuilt on the notion of canonical government configuration, defined partly interms of direction.

() W and Z (Z a maximal projection, and W and Z immediately dominatedby some Y) are in acanonical government configurationiff

I suspect that the widespread belief that adjunct parasitic gaps are more acceptable than extraction

out of adjuncts is partially due to lack of control for factors such as tense. The most prominent exampleof degraded extraction from an adjunct in Huang () involves a tensed adjunct: *Who did Marycry after John hit. On the other hand, parasitic gaps have traditionally been illustrated with examplesinvolving untensed adjuncts, such asWhich articles did John file without reading, from Engdahl (:). As Engdahl shows (pp.), parasitic gaps inside tensed adjuncts are less readily acceptable, atleast in English. This cannot be the whole story, as Cattell ( ) discusses both tensed and untensedadjuncts, and Engdahl () shows that the real gap site is more accessible than the parasitic gap site.However, it would be interesting to know how much of the perceived difference would remain if thesefactors were controlled for.


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Introduction

(a) V governs NP to its right in the grammar of the language in ques-tion and W precedes Z

or

(b) V governs NP to its left in the grammar of the language and Zprecedes W.

This therefore builds a leftright asymmetry into the core of locality theory.Without going into the details of Kaynes theory, the overall effect is thatin a language like English, where V governs NP to the right, governed con-stituents on right branches can move arbitrarily far up a right-branching tree,

regardless of whether nodes on the path between filler and gap are themselvesgoverned or not. On the other hand, subjects, being on left branches, donot occur in a canonical government configuration with their sister. Subcon-stituents of that subject therefore cannot move offthat left branch withoutviolating the Connectedness condition. In other words, extraction of governedconstituents out of adjuncts, but not subjects, is predicted to be possible byKaynes theory. Kayne does not explicitly recognize this prediction, but it isimplicitly endorsed in trees such as his (), p., which show a single path

extending from an adjunct-internal gap to an adjunct-external filler.This feature of Connectedness was fixed by Longobardi (), who claims

that:

It is well-known, and much discussed in the syntactic literature (cf. most recently,Chomsky ()) that complement sentences which are not strictly subcategorized[footnote omitted] by a predicate (e.g. sentential subjects on the one hand; and onthe other, gerund clauses; clauses introduced by certain prepositions such as before,in order to, and without; by adverbial phrases perhaps preposed by WH-movement,such aswhile, when) are all more or less resistant to extraction of a WH-constituent.(Longobardi:)

Longobardi accommodates this observation within a revised version of theConnectedness condition, by incorporating the additional condition W gov-erns Z (p. ) into the definition of canonical government configuration in() above. As adjuncts are ungoverned constituents, they never occur in theposition of Z in a canonical government configuration, and movement out of

adverbial clauses is consequently blocked.It is striking that Longobardis perception of the adjunct subextraction

facts differs from Chomskys () range in acceptability. We may thereforequestion whether Kaynes Connectedness condition really needed fixing. The

As it happens, Longobardis condition may go too far, barring movement ofadjuncts, as well asmovementout ofadjuncts, as government is so crucial to any nonlocal dependency on his theory.


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evidence is equivocal. Certainly, regular wh-movement out of adjuncts issometimes possible. However, there is one good argument for a connectednesseffect, in more deeply embedded adverbial clauses. Kayne () showed thatalthough a parasitic gap inside a clausal subject could be licensed, a parasiticgap inside a subject inside that clausal subject could not be licensed.

() (a) ?a person that [[people who read [a description of ]] usuallyend up fascinated with ]

(b) *a person that [[people to whom [descriptions of ] are read]usually end up fascinated with ]

(Kayne:)

Longobardi shows that the same effect emerges if an adverbial clause is embed-ded within another adverbial clause.

() (a) ?The head of cattle that [we have eliminated [without trying topersuade the vet [to cure ]]] were the ones in the worst shape.

(b) *The head of cattle that [we have eliminated [without tryingto call a vet [instead of killing ]]] were the ones in worst shape.

(Longobardi

:

)Balanced against this, however, is the phenomenon ofsymbiotic gapsdiscussedby Levine and Sag (), in which one gap is contained within an adverbialclause and one within a subject.

() What kinds of books do [authors of ] argue about royalties [afterwriting ]? (Levine and Sag:)

If both adverbial clauses and subjects are islands, then such examples raise

serious questions. For example, we do not know which is the real gap andwhich is parasitic (hence the termsymbiotic gap). Consequently, we do notknow what is licensing what. On Longobardis revision of Connectedness,such examples are predicted to be as ungrammatical as (b) or (b), con-trary to fact. However, if we reject Longobardis revision in favour of Kaynesoriginal proposal, then such examples are unproblematic: the real gap is insidethe adjunct, which, being on a right branch, is able to move up and license the

parasitic gap contained within the left-branch subject.On balance, it seems that Longobardis revision must be rejected. This leavesus in need of an explanation of the pattern demonstrated in (). I believethat this is related to the fact that wh-movement out of such more deeplyembedded adverbial clauses is impossible, regardless of considerations relatedto parasitic gaps. The theory to be developed in Part II will have some bearingon this issue, as will be discussed in Chapter.


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Introduction

As was implicit in Kayne (), then, we should not prohibit extractionfrom adjuncts in principle. The first explicit such proposal is found in Chom-sky (). One of the principal achievements of that work is to present aunified treatment of three types of locality effect, previously dealt with sep-arately by Subjacency, the Empty Category Principle, and Huangs CED. Amajor obstacle to such unification, though, was that violations of the differ-ent conditions produce different results. Classical Subjacency violations like() frequently feel only very mildly degraded, if at all, once factors like thesyntactic category of the extractee are controlled for, while in contrast, ECPviolations are generally horrible, as with thethat-traceeffect in ().

() Which shoes are you wondering [whether to buy ]?

() *Who did you say [that bought the shoes]?

Without going into the details of his quite elaborate system, the solutionthat Chomsky offered works broadly as follows. Maximal projections typicallyconstitute barriers to movement, but the barrierhood of certain maximal pro-jections can be circumvented by adjoining the moved phrase to that projection

as an intermediate landing site. This means that the large distances coveredby movement are composed of a series of very local steps. However, in somecircumstances, a moved phrase cannot adjoin to a barrier. In those cases,the moved phrase must cross the barrier in one fell swoop. These crossingsof barriers by movement lead to degradation of a sentence, and the morebarriers that are crossed in this way, the greater the degradation. Specifically,if a movement in a sentence crosses one barrier like this, the sentence is mildlydegraded, as with the Subjacency violation in (). If more than one barrier is

crossed, though, the sentence will be categorically unacceptable.As well as offering a unification of the various disparate locality effects,

then, another achievement ofBarriersis that it implies a way in which thegrammar might handle undeniably gradient data in this area. To be sure,the gradience is quite coarse-grained (only three degrees of grammaticalityare distinguished: crossing no barriers is grammatical, crossing one barrier ismildly degraded, and crossing more than that is ungrammatical), but even thisis a start.

Browning (), basing her discussion on an idea of Belletti and Rizzi (), incorporates furtherdegrees of gradience by alluding to the segmentcategory distinction developed in May () andChomsky (). Crossing a barriercategoryworks as above. Crossing a barriersegmentcauses milderdegradation. On this analysis, extraction from adjuncts has a status intermediate between -Subjacencyand-Subjacency violations, or in other words, intermediate between classical Subjacency violationsand ECP violations. Other ramifications allow her system to capture further fine-grained contrasts inacceptability. However, many people find certain cases of extraction from adjuncts fully acceptable,and certainly no worse than a classical Subjacency violation.


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How many barriers is extraction from an adjunct predicted to cross? TheBarriersframework is flexible enough that the answer to this question is notstraightforward, but extraction from an adjunct adjoined to VP probablycrosses a single barrier, while extraction from an adjunct adjoined to IP shouldcross two barriers. One piece of evidence in favour of this claim concerns thefact that (a) is ambiguous, but (b) is not: in the former case,theycould be(i) so angry that they cannot hold the meeting, or (ii) so angry that it is notsafe for us to hold the meeting. In the latter case, only reading (i) survives.

() (a) They were too angry [to hold the meeting].(b) Which meeting were they too angry [to hold ]?

(Chomsky:)

Chomsky analyses this in terms of a height difference: reading (i) emergeswhen too angry to hold the meetingforms a VP-internal constituent, whilereading (ii) emerges where to hold the meeting is adjoined VP-externally.Extracting from the adjunct then blocks the VP-external structure, as extract-ing from a VP-external adjunct crosses two barriers and leads to severe degra-dation.Wh-movement thereby resolves the structural ambiguity by making

one of the two structures illegitimate.Chomsky (), then, predicts that extraction from an adjunct will never

be fully acceptable, but will be only mildly degraded in some cases, and fullyunacceptable in others. It also predicts a correlation between the attachmentheight of an adjunct and the possibility of extracting out of it: the lower VP-adjuncts allow extraction more easily than higher IP-adjuncts.

Another prediction made by Chomsky () is that extraction from VP-adjuncts will behave like extraction fromwh-islands like () or other weakislands, as both reduce to Subjacency. In each case, the movement crossesa single barrier, which prevents the movement from being fully acceptable.Chomsky shows that, as with wh-islands, extraction of NP is slightly moreacceptable than extraction of PP, and extraction of an adjunct is ungrammat-ical, yielding an ECP violation.

Heres why: we assume, as is typical in Barriers, that wh-movement moves to [Spec,C] viaadjunction to VP if appropriate, but that other intermediate landing sites, such as adjunction to an

adjunct or to IP, are unavailable. The adjunct maximal projection is therefore a blocking category,and hence a barrier, and IP is a barrier by inheritance if the adjunct is adjoined to IP. Movementfrom within an IP-adjoined constituent to [Spec,C] therefore crosses two barriers, leading to severedegradation. However, if the constituent is VP-adjoined, the moved constituent can also adjoin toVP as an intermediate landing site, giving rise to the configuration [CP wh . . . [VPtwh[VP[VP . . . ][XP . . . twh...]]]]. In this case, one barrier (XP) is crossed by the first movement step, and none bythe second movement step, giving rise to only mild degradation. If, alternatively, adjunction of NP tothe adjunct maximal projection is possible, as considered at one point by Chomsky, extraction of NPshould be possible without degradation.


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Introduction

() (a) He is the person who they left [before speaking to ].(b) [?]He is the person to whom they left [before speaking ].(c) *How did you leave [before fixing the car ]?

(Chomsky:)

This prediction was fleshed out in research into the properties of weak islands,notably in Cinque (). Cinques main relevant observation, building onearlier work by Pesetsky (), Kroch (), and Rizzi (), is that theacceptability of extracting out of a weak island depends on what you try toextract. In particular, Cinque claims that it is only possible to extract referen-tial arguments out of weak islands (typically NPs, and maybe PPs as in (a)).

We therefore find contrasts like those in (), which show that extraction of areferential phrase out of awh-island (the major type of weak island) contrastswith extraction of a nonreferential phrase.

() (a) ATo

quale

whichdei

of.thetuoi

yourfigli

childrenti

youchiedi

wonder

[quanti

how muchsoldi

moneyhai

have.dato ]?

given

To which one of your children do you wonder how much moneyyou gave? (Cinque:)

(b) *QuantiHow many

chili

kilosti

youha

has.chiesto

asked[se

whether

pesavi ]?

weighed.How many kilos did he ask you whether you weighed?

(Cinque:)

Such a distinction is also found in cases of extraction from adjuncts, where() shows that extraction of nonreferential NPs is impossible.

() *QuantiHow many

chili

kilosha

has.smesso

stoppeddi

tomangiare

eat[pur

even

senza

withoutpesare ]

weigh.How many kilos did he stop eating without even weighing?

(Cinque:)

Extraction from adjuncts and fromwh-islands is not identical, however. Themajor difference is that (a) showed that extraction of PP from awh-island ispossible, while () shows that extraction of NP from an adjunct is preferred toextraction of PP, a judgement which conflicts with that of Chomsky reportedin (b) above, but is shared by many English speakers.


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() (a) Anna,Anna

che

whome ne sono andato via

I went away[senza

withoutneanche

even

salutare ]say goodbye.Anna, who I went away without even saying goodbye to, . . .

(b) *Anna,Anna

con

withla

thequale

whichme ne sono andato via

I went away[senza

without

neanche

evenparlare ]

speak.Anna, to whom I went away without even speaking, . . .

(Cinque:)

This leads Cinque to develop a theory in which apparent cases of extrac-tion from an adjunct are actually derived by A-binding of a null pronom-inal, an analysis which does not straightforwardly carry over to cases, suchas (), of extraction of non-nominal phrases from weak islands. However,this should not obscure the clear common core of locality effects holdingin adjuncts and in weak islands. Both classes contrast sharply with subjects,

for instance, from which any extraction is quite marginal in English andItalian.

() ??Piero,Piero

che

whocredo

believe.che

that[invitare ]

invite.sia

be.

necessario, ...

necessaryPiero, who I believe that it is necessary to invite, . . .

This, then, was the late GB state of the art. Adjuncts looked more like weakislands than like strong islands, and we knew this not only because extractionout of an adjunct is sometimes only mildly degraded, and extracting theright sort of thing out of a weak island felt less severe than other types oflocality violation; but also because there is a characteristic division betweenconstituents which can, and cannot, be extracted from weak islands, and fairlysimilar patterns show up in cases of extraction from adjuncts and in cases

of extraction fromwh-complement clauses. Some degree of consensus alongthese lines appears to have been reached in the earlys: as well as worksby GB theorists reiterating this position and offering alternative accounts ofit, such as Hegarty () or Chomsky and Lasnik (), there are also worksoutside GB making similar empirical claims, such as Pollard and Sag (),who list a series of acceptable cases of extraction from adjuncts (although theydo not explicitly consider them as weak islands); or Postal (), which builds


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Introduction

on Cinques work and notes that adjuncts generally behave like the nearestequivalent to weak islands in his own system of classification of islands.

With the advent of minimalism, though, strange things happened to thisconsensus. The seminal minimalist works, Chomsky () and Chomsky(), say next to nothing about CED effects, but one early work, Takahashi(), did offer a novel account, with largely similar empirical predictionsto those of the late GB consensus. Takahashis idea comes in several stages.Firstly, there is a condition that movement should be as short as possible: nopotential landing site should be skipped, or more specifically, every maximalprojection on the path from the foot to the head of the chain should be

adjoined to. Secondly, it is not possible to adjoin to some maximal projections.You cannot adjoin to a constituent that has moved, because that would meanthat the copies of that moved constituent were different from each other; andyou cannot adjoin to a conjunct in a coordinate structure unless you adjointo all of the conjuncts, because adjoining to some conjuncts but not otherswould make the conjuncts too dissimilar to be coordinated. Thirdly, adjunctsare treated as a variety of coordinate structure.

If we buy all of this, then we derive a prediction that, wherever adjunc-

tion to a maximal projection is impossible, movement out of that projectionshould be degraded, because the impossibility of adjunction conflicts withthe fact that Shortest Move necessitates that adjunction. More specifically,we predict that extraction out of subjects and adjuncts should be degradedin languages like English, but for slightly different reasons. Extraction outof subjects should be degraded because the subject is taken to originate ina VP-internal position and raise to [Spec,T]. This means that English subjectsare always moved categories, and adjunction to moved categories is banned.

This means in turn that extraction from English subjects is predicted to bedegraded. The explanation for the degradation of extraction out of adjunctsis largely parallel, except that the reason for the impossibility of adjunction toan adjunct lies instead in the notion that adjunction structures are a kind ofcoordinate structure.

On Takahashis account, violations of Shortest Move necessitated by theimpossibility of adjunction to some projection do not lead to absolute

ungrammaticality. Rather, he follows Lasnik and Saito () in distinguishingbetween traces of complements and of adjuncts. On Takahashis account,intermediate traces of movement of a complement can delete at LF, whilethis is not possible for intermediate traces of movement of an adjunct. And ifthe offending chain links remain at LF, then the violation is more severe thanif they do not. In this way, Takahashi builds a complementnoncomplement


32/278


asymmetry into his theory, allowing him to account for distinctions like thefollowing.

() (a) ?*Who did you go home [before talking to ]?(b) *How did you go home [before fixing the car ]?

(Takahashi:)

There are clearly many problems with Takahashis theory. There are worriesabout theory-internal consistency (for example, the notion that links in achain must be identical conflicts with the widespread minimalist use of lateadjunction, as in Chomsky, or Fox and Nissenbaum), but the major

worry concerns the rationale for banning adjunction to adjuncts. The treat-ment of adjuncts as coordinate structures is problematic for two reasons:firstly, it is indefensible in the case of a variety of modal, conditional, andother adjuncts (does A unless Breally count as a coordinate structure?); andsecondly, it is simply not true that extraction from a single conjunct of acoordinate structure is impossible. We have known this since Ross (), whogave examples like the following, and more systematic subsequent researchinto the phenomenon has been done by, for example, Goldsmith (), Lakoff(), and Kehler ().

() (a) Heres the whiskey which I [[went to the store] and [bought ]].

(Ross:)(b) Which dress has she [[gone] and [ruined ]] now?

(Ross:)

Clearly, these examples are semantically not typical coordinations: in (), the

meaning ofandis more than simply conjunction. Rather, we understand thatthe speaker went to the storein order to buy whiskeyandthenbought whiskey.In examples like (b) (known as pseudocoordination), on the other hand,the meaning is somehow less than simply conjunction, because there arenttwo separate predicates to conjointhere is no going independent of theruining. This reflects a persistent intuition that exceptions to Ross CoordinateStructure Constraint form a semantic natural class. However, this intuition

cannot help Takahashis project of treating adjunction structures as coordinatestructures. Whatever the meaning of prepositions introducing adjuncts suchas without, before, despite, or unlessis, they clearly are not typical coordina-tions. In that case, even if a treatment of adjunction structures as coordinatestructures turns out to be plausible, it is not at all clear that we would expectthesecoordinate structures to fall into the class of coordinate structures towhich the CSC applies without exception.


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Introduction

However, despite these problems, Takahashis thesis deserves recognition asthe first attempt to base a theory of extraction from adjuncts on minimalistprinciples such as Shortest Move, rather than the Subjacency condition whichformed the backbone of the Barriersframework. Moreover, the judgementspredicted by that theory largely follow those ofBarriersand later work, in thatmany cases of extraction from adjuncts are predicted to have an intermediatelevel of acceptability, rather than being fully grammatical or ungrammatical.Such empirical predictions contrast with those of a cluster of theories, orig-inally proposed by Toyoshima () but more commonly associated withUriagereka (), which attempt to derive the principal effects of the CED,

without reference to the notion of government, which has been ostracized inminimalist theory.In Uriagerekas theory and subsequent research along the same lines (Nunes

and Uriagereka , Johnson , Sabel , Zwart , and Mller),subjects and adjuncts are taken to be similar in that they are nonprojectingphrasal sisters of a phrasal constituent. This distinguishes them from cate-gories which project, and from complements, which are nonprojecting sistersof heads. This provides a close minimalist counterpart of the GB notion of

proper government, which essentially amounts for the purposes of the CEDto being within the maximal projection of a lexical head.

To see how these theories might work (although different theories offer dif-ferent ultimate reasons for ungrammaticality), consider the following treenothing changes if subjects are generated VP-internally.

() TP

DP

Subject T VP

VP

VHead

DP

Complement

XP

Adjunct

There are obvious differences between the set of constituents picked out by Uriagerekas charac-terization and by Huangs: [Spec,V] is properly governed, but is a nonprojecting sister of a phrasalconstituent; while a VP adjunct attached to an unergative intransitive verb is not properly governed,but possibly only has a head for a sister in bare phrase structure. There is enough leeway in the relevantdefinitions that no clear predictions emerge from these discrepancies.


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Now, imagine that merging one phrasal constituent with another phrasalconstituent is something that our language faculty cannot do: something goeswrong in the process of building up phrasein one derivational workspace,building up phrase in another derivational workspace, and then gettingthe contents of one derivational workspace into the other, to attach it there.Instead, we must do something extra, specifically to the phrasal sister whichdoes not project further. Exactly what we do is one locus of variation amongthe works listed above: Uriagereka applies Spellout, for example, while John-son appeals to an operation of Renumeration. But the common core of thesedifferent conceptions is that the syntactic structure is somehow flattened or

otherwise rendered inaccessible to further syntactic operations. On Johnsonsmodel, for example, the Renumerated constituent behaves like a giant lexicalitem. You cannot then move part of that constituent, stranding the rest, forthe same reason that you cannot move part of a lexical item. This predictsextraction out of subjects and adjuncts to be impossible.

These theories are extremely elegant and exemplify the parsimonious mini-malist ideal of getting something for nothing. Uriagereka, for example, derivesCEDeffects using nothing more than worked-out definitions of core minimal-

ist operations like Merge and Spellout. Conceptually, then, everything here isvery attractive. The problem, of course, is that there is no obvious way to dealwith the exceptions originally documented by Chomsky for adjuncts and Rossfor subjects. This problem is, if anything, exacerbated by the fact that thesetheories derive from fundamental components of the minimalist architecture:we probably should not start tinkering with definitions of Merge, just becausewe find a grammatical case of extraction out of an adjunct.

And so we reach a stand-off, one which is currently still unresolved. On

the one side, we have people following Huang and Uriagereka, producing veryelegant theories deriving the result that adjuncts are strong islands, and somovement of anything out of an adjunct is impossible. On the other side, thereis Chomsky (or at least the Chomsky of the s), Cinque, and Takahashi,producing theories with more nuanced empirical predictions, in which somecases of extraction from adjuncts are predicted to be marginally acceptable.

At present, it seems that researchers typically assume that the facts look

more or less as Huang and Uriagereka predict, which is surprising, given theprominence of the works in which counterexamples have appeared. Empir-ically, the facts above appear to decide the matter: unless some method ofallowing exceptions is forthcoming, theories in the Huang/Uriagereka mouldare too restrictive. However, the reason why ideas like Uriagerekas are sowidely adopted is probably not just a matter of their elegance. Quite simply,in many cases, extraction out of adjuncts looks much more restricted thanextraction out of a typical weak island. We will see further examples of this


35/278

Introduction

in Section ., but to mention just one, the crosslinguistic distribution ofextraction out of adjuncts is restricted. Languages like French and Dutchdisallow any such extraction.

() (a) ElleShe

est

isalle

goneen

inAngleterre

England[sans

withoutlire

read.le

the

livre]

bookShe went to England without reading the book.

(b) *lethe

livre

bookqu

thatelle

sheest

isalle

goneen

inAngleterre

England[sans

without

lire ]

read.the book that she went to England without reading

(Postal:)

() (a) JanJohn

is

is[tangos

tangosfluitend]

whistlinggearriveerd

arrivedJohn arrived whistling tangos.

(b) *WatWhat

is

isJan

John[ fluitend]

whistlinggearriveerd?

arrivedWhat did John arrive whistling?

The Dutch case is only slightly surprising, as extraction of NP from weakislands is also impossible in Dutch for at least some speakers, as shownby Browning (), citing an unpublished talk by Hilda Koopman andDominique Sportiche (the following data give subordinate clause wordorders).

() (a) *Wiewho

hij

hezich

selfafvroeg

asked[of

ifjij

youaardig

nicevond]

foundWho he wondered whether you liked.

(b) *Wiewho

hij

hezich

selfafvroeg

asked[of

ifjouw

youaardig

nicevond]

foundWho he wondered whether liked you.

Extraction of PPs from weak islands in Dutchispossible, as in ().

() Metwith

wie

whohij

hezich

selfafvroeg

asked[of

ifhij

hezou

wouldkunnen

can

praten]

talkWith whom he wondered whether he would be able to talk.


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However, extraction of PPs from adjuncts in Dutch is equally ungrammaticalas extraction of NPs.

() *Metwithwiewho

benare

jeyou

hierhere

gekomencome

[omfor

teto

praten]?

talkWith whom did you come here to speak?

The impossibility of extraction from adjuncts in Dutch is expected if, asmentioned above, adjuncts behave more or less like weak islands, except that

extraction of PPs from weak islands is much better than extraction of PPs fromadjuncts. Why such a pattern should hold remains a mystery, though. And inFrench, given that extraction of NP from weak islands is well documented, theimpossibility of extracting NP from adjuncts remains unexplained.

It seems, then, that extraction from adjuncts has a more restricted distri-bution than extraction from other weak islands. This may suggest that it isnot such a huge idealization to assume that extraction from adjuncts is alwaysimpossible, as theories following Huang and Uriagereka do.

However, in this book, I will adopt the Chomskyan position that adjunctsare, roughly, only weak islands (with the facts concerning extraction of PPremaining unexplained). This is not just because of the existence of coun-terexamples to the generalization that adjuncts are strong islands but becauseof the specific distribution of those counterexamples. This is Cinques claim,as discussed above, and it is also suggested by processing studies such asKluender (). However, adopting this position does beg the question of whyextraction out of adjuncts is so restricted. This work is, in part, a contribution

to a satisfactory answer to that problem.Before we move on to the meat of the book, though, I will briefly address

a related issue in locality. This is the question of whether a unified accountof extraction out of subjects and adjuncts is even desirable. In contrast tothe theories of Cattell and Huang, we saw above that Kaynes Connectednessdisallows extraction from subjects, but not adjuncts, in SVO languages likeEnglish with rightward adjuncts. Extraction must follow a path branching in

the canonical direction of government. So in English, extraction is predictedto be impossible from constituents on left branches, like subjects, while itshould be possible, all else being equal, from constituents on right branches,like adjuncts. This provides a clear contrast to Huangs unified account ofextraction from subjects and adjuncts, and the choice between Kaynes andHuangs positions has been debated ever since. Although it is in principle anempirically based choice, the data in these areas are notoriously murky, andthe idealizations that one makes have a significant effect on what we take to


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Introduction

be the explananda. However, the data concerning extraction from subjects area reasonable fit for the predictions of the Connectedness theory: Kayne (fn.,p.) already noted, following Ross (), that relativization out of subjectsis possible in SOV Japanese.

() (a) [Mary-gaMary

sono

thatboosi-o

hatkabutte

wearingita]

waskoto-ga

thingakiraka

obvious

da

isThat Mary was wearing that hat is obvious.

(b) Kore-wa

this

[[Mary-ga

Mary

kabutte

wearing

ita]

was

koto-ga

thing

akiraka

obviousna]

isboosi

hatda

isThis is the hat which it is obvious that Mary was wearing.

(Ross:)

To this, we can add examples of extraction from subjects in two further SOVlanguages, from Stepanov ().

() Navajo:

(a) ?ch a adog

iisx-(n)

..killg

(something)-shi-

me-with

bhzin-g

is-known-nahai.

..barkThe dog that I know to have killed (something) is barking.Lit. The dog that [(the fact) that killed something is known

to me] is barking.(b) *Ashkii

boyyahya-go

entered-hadeeshghaazh-ee

I-shouted-out-

sitsil

my-younger-brothert.

isThe boy that I shouted when came in is my younger brother.

() Turkish:

(a) [Opi [Ahmet-inAhmet-

git-me-si]-nin

go---ben-i

I-

z-d-g-]

sadden---ev.

houseThe house which [that Ahmet went to ] saddened me.


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(b) *[[AhmetAhmet.

i yedigi]

eat--iin]

forsana

you-

kzdimanger-- pastayi.cake-I got angry with you because Ahmet ate the cake.

(Stepanov: )

Furthermore, Chung () has argued that VSO Chamorro, and . . . VSOlanguages more generally (p.), allow extraction from sentential subjects, onthe basis of examples like the following.

() Hayiwho

siguru-certain

[nathat

prawill

u-ginnna-.win

ithe

karera ]? race

Who is it certain that the race will be won by? (Chung:)

Chung also shows, on the basis of facts concerning case agreement betweenembedding verbs and sentential subjects, that the embedded clause in a rangeof examples such as the above is a true subject, and not extraposed. It thereforeappears that extraction from subjects in VSO and SOV languages is, if not

ubiquitous, at least fairly common.Although the VSO case is somewhat less straightforward than the SOV case,

because VSO is typically assumed to be derived through movement, such dataare still significant if we take Connectedness to be a theory about surface order.There are two other cases where the subject and object appear on the sameside of the verb, namely VOS and OSV orders. Here, though, the rarity of theorders means that evidence is hard to come by. Dryer () lists only four

OSV languages in a

,

-language sample, and I am unaware of any studiesof locality in such languages.A-locality in three VOS languageshasbeen studied in detail, namely Mala-

gasy, Palauan (Georgopoulos, ), and Tzotzil (Aissen,). However, thetwo former languages are relatively uninformative, as Georgopoulos has sug-gested that Palauan A-constructions are derived by base-generation and nullresumption, and a similarly movement-free analysis has been suggested forwh-constructions in Malagasy.

The Tzotzil data, on the other hand, is equivocal for other reasons. Amovement analysis is taken to be more appropriate here, but Aissen ()shows that extraction is possible from internal, but not external, subjects.

() (a) ??Buchuwho

ta=x-chonolay

-selly-ajnil?

-wifeWhose wife is selling?


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Introduction

(b) Buchuwho

i-cham

-diex-chamal?

-childWhose child died? (Aissen:)

Only the least surprising subcase of extraction from a subject by movement ispossible here, then. On the whole, there is very little evidence for the sort ofextraction patterns in VOS languages that the Connectedness theory predicts.However, this is probably due in part to the rarity of these languages: tomy knowledge, Tzotzil is the only well-studied language exhibiting both VOSorder and general A-movement.

So far, then, the predictions of Connectedness hold up well. SOV andVSO languages frequently show movement out of subjects; and more data isrequired on OSV and VOS languages. This leaves the negative prediction, thatextraction from subjects is impossible in SVO and OVS languages. Given theextreme rarity of OVS order, we will concentrate here on SVO languages whereextraction from subjects is claimed to be acceptable. Sabel () mentionstwo such languages, namely the Kwa language Akan of Ghana, and the Bantoidlanguage Tuki of Cameroon, but I have been unable to find any more data

about these cases. However, one case of extraction from subjects in an SVOlanguage, namely Russian (Stepanov,), has been fairly widely publicized.Stepanovs data are as follows.

() (a) Swith

kem

whomby

ty

youxotel

wantedctoby

that-govorit

to-speak

bylo

were..by

odno

oneudovolstvie?

pleasure..

With whom would you want that [to speak ] were sheer plea-sure?

(b) Ctowhat

by

ty

youxotel

wantedctoby

that-kupit

to-buyne

notsostavlyalo

constitute

by

nikakogo

notrudo?

labourWhat would you want that [to buy ] would not be any

trouble? (Stepanov

:

)However, there is reason to think that the embedded clause here is not asubject, but a preverbal clausal object. The reason is that choices of nominal

I am very grateful to Alyona Titova for explaining this to me, and then having the patience toexplain it to me a second time when I lost her first explanation.


40/278


predicate other than neuterodno udovolstvieresult in different agreement onthe copula.

() Swith

kemwhom

by

tyyou

xotelwant

ctobythat.

govoritspeak.

byl

were..by

splonoj

entireuas?

horror..To whom do you want that it would be a complete horror to speak?

Russian shows subjectverb agreement, but not objectverb agreement, and soit appears that the subject of the above examples is not the embedded clause.

In Stepanovs original examples, this is not clear, as the verb always showsthird person neuter singular agreement, which could have been a default form.However, the nominal predicates he chose were both third person neutersingular. Once we vary this, a fuller pattern emerges.

Disregarding Russian, then, the data concerning extraction from subjectsare a reasonably good fit for the predictions of Kaynes theory. Even if twoputative SVO counterexamples remain, it seems that extraction from senten-tial subjects is not particularly surprising in SOV and VSO languages, while it

is very rare in SVO languages. One question we will address below concernsthe extent to which this is also true of extraction from adjuncts. To anticipate:I am unaware of any counterexamples to the predictions of the Connectednesstheory, but that theory in isolation would substantially overgenerate, and it isunclear how much independent work the theory would do when paired withother, independently necessary constraints. While Connectedness does a goodjob of predicting the distribution of extraction from sentential subjects (even ifit requires supplementary constraints), the further restrictions on extractionfrom adjuncts will be shown to be different, and more severe. This suggeststhat a nonunified approach to CED effects should be pursued.

One major proponent of such an approach is Stepanov (; ).Stepanovs argument, in particular in the paper, is simple: many lan-guages allow extraction from subjects, as we have seen above; but none,according to him, allow extraction from adjuncts. Therefore, there is some-thing fundamentally different about the two types of category, and Huangs

attempt to find characteristics common to the two was misguided.As we have seen, this argument is based on a false premise, because cer-

tain languages allow extraction from adjuncts, just as certain languages allow

Things are slightly more complex with Stepanovs other example, (b), because the fixedness ofthe phraseNe sostavljat trudanot be any trouble makes it tough to find alternatives to trudawithother genders. As things stand, (b) is compatible with the analysis sketched in the text, but the onlyevidence specifically for that analysis comes from the contrast between (a) and ().


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Introduction

extraction from subjects. However, a more subtle argument will be pursuedhere. It is not the case that those languages with movement out of adjunctsalso allow movement out of subjects. For example, we have seen that severallanguages allow extraction out of subjects, but not adjuncts. English, on theother hand, allows at least some extraction out of adjuncts, as we have seen,while extraction out of subjects, if possible at all, is very marginal (see alreadyRoss:,and Kuno, as well as Levine and Sag, Sauerlandand Elbourne, and Chomsky, among others, on the restrictive con-ditions on extraction out of subjects in English. Although some such examplesare clearly worse than others, opinions vary as to whether any of them are good

enough for us to class them as grammatical).() (a) %Of which cars were [the hoods ] damaged by the explosion?

(Ross:)(b) The evidence which I blew up the building [to destroy ]

Moreover, we will see later that the factors which can ameliorate extraction outof adjuncts have no effect on extraction out of subjects. These considerationssuggest that a nonunified approach to CED phenomena is on the right track:

the legitimate cases of extraction from the relevant domains do not patternalike crosslinguistically or within a given language.

The most relevant immediate consequence of this is that it legitimizes theprogramme of looking for an account of patterns of extraction out of adjunctswithout addressing patterns of extraction out of subjects. If subjects andadjuncts undeniably formed a natural class with respect to these phenomena,then a theory which only said anything about adjuncts would be gravelylacking. However, if their apparent unity is illusory, then we are justified in

pursuing a theory which does not address the subject data.This nonunified approach to adjuncts and subjects also militates against

Uriagerekas approach to CED effects. On that approach, it is inevitable thatmost subjects and adjuncts pattern together, because this is dictated by phrasestructure alone: our constituency tests tell us that subjects and adjuncts arenonprojecting phrasal sisters of phrases, and so Uriagerekas analysis shouldapply equally to both. If so, the evidence that a nonunified approach to

these two domains is more appropriate also argues against the unified, post-Uriagereka approach to CED effects.Much in this area is still up in the air, then. There is a real tension between

the overly restrictive Huang/Uriagereka approach to extraction from adjuncts,which classes adjuncts as strong islands; and the overly permissive Chom-sky/Cinque approach, which classes them as more similar to weak islands.Moreover, there is no consensus as to whether or not subjects and adjuncts


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Further Puzzles

form a natural class (Cattell, Huang, Longobardi, Nunes and Uriagereka) ornot (Kayne, Stepanov), as far as locality is concerned. However, my position inthis book will be that adjuncts are weak islands (disregarding the discrepancyconcerning extraction of PPs), and do not form a natural class with subjects.This leaves us with work to do, as additional constraints on extraction fromadjuncts, over and above their weak islandhood, must be found, in order torein in the excessive permissiveness of analyses based on weak islandhood inisolation. This is the task of Part II.

. Further Puzzles

Although we will not properly develop our theory of extraction from adjunctsuntil Part II, this section gives some reasons to doubt that the extra restrictionson extraction from adjuncts are purely syntactic in nature. One of thesereasons is conceptual: we have a small, powerful, and reasonably principledarray of minimalist locality principles at the moment, and if those principlesdont have anything to say, then there isnt much room for manuvre insuch a stripped down syntactic architecture. In that case, the only place to

look is at the interfaces. The other reason is empirical: there are patternsin the data which do not look like the sort of thing which syntactic localitytheories normally account for, and so it is natural to assume that somethingnonsyntactic is at work here.

.. The Empirical Puzzles

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