Abstract.  The traditional ‘‘unified’’ approaches to extractability out of subjects and adjuncts in the form of Huang's (1982) Condition on Extraction Domains (CED) and Chomsky's (1986a)Barriers and its minimalist descendants face an empirical challenge presented by languages in which extraction out of subjects is possible but extraction out of adjuncts is not. The existence of such languages calls into question the unifying basis for the traditional accounts—namely, the complement/noncomplement distinction that was at the core of these accounts. In this paper I consider a possible extension of a recent minimalist account making use of the complement/noncomplement distinction—Nunes and Uriagereka (2000)—to the problematic languages and show that it also encounters conceptual and empirical problems. I then propose an ‘‘eclectic’’ minimalist approach to extraction domains in which extractability out of subjects and adjuncts are regulated by different mechanisms of grammar in a nonoverlapping manner.

An algorithm of phrase structure building is proposed within the bare phrase structure framework. The algorithm is rooted in the idea that applications of Merge-the operation that combines syntactic objects-should not change the set of basic relations (in particular, c-command) in the existing structure, what Chomsky (2000) terms ''Least Tampering.'' Under the proposed algorithm, this idea translates into a requirement that Merger must take place at the root of the tree/phrase marker when possible. As a result, the algorithm forces (base-generated or moved) structural adjuncts to be Merged postcyclically. Three empirical consequences of the proposed algorithm are discussed:(1) constructions involving raising across the experiencer (e.g., John seems to Mary to be smart) are shown not to be problematic for the Minimal Link Condition (cf. Chomsky 1995b); (2) a novel account of Adjunct Island effects (Huang 1982) is proposed; and (3) a principled analysis of approximative inversion in Russian is offered.

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The experimental literature on the pragmatic abilities of bilinguals is rather sparse. The only study investigating adult second language (L2) learners (Slabakova, 2010) found an increase of pragmatic responses in that population relative to monolinguals. The results of studies on early bilingual children are unclear, some finding a significant increase in pragmatic responses in early bilingual children (preschoolers) relative to monolinguals (Siegal et al., 2007), while another (Antoniou and Katsos, 2017), testing school children, does not. We tested adult French L2 learners of English and Spanish (in their two languages) as well as French monolingual controls in Experiment 1 and Italian-Slovenian early bilingual children (in both languages) and Slovenian monolingual controls in Experiment 2. Our results were similar to those of Antoniou and Katsos (2017) in early bilingual children, but different from those of Siegal et al. (2007). We found no pragmatic bias in adult L2 leaners relative to adult monolinguals.

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