In current linguistic theory, the theoretical status of adjunct extractions, as in for example How often do you think Robin sees Kim? is, somewhat surprisingly, an unresolved issue, with some investigators arguing that only arguments extract syntactically, entailing analyses of adverbial gaps via fundamentally different mechanisms from those posited for argument extraction. We adduce extensive evidence against such positions from a number of languages which exhibit morphological or syntactic phenomena which are sensitive to binding (extraction) domains and where this morphosyntactic flagging is present in instances of adjunct extraction as well as argument extraction. We also present language-internal arguments for the syntactic nature of adjunct extraction in English, including the coextensiveness of adjunct and argument extraction and their parallelism with respect to strong/weak crossover effects. Finally, we discuss the challenge which binding domain effects pose for accounts of adjunct extraction in various frameworks.
Since Noam Chomsky's 1977 paper 'On wh-movement', syntactic theorists almost universally have assumed that tough~too~enough constructions are to be treated by the same formal mechanism as wh-extraction constructions, in spite of well-known syntactic divergences between the two types. We argue that these divergences reflect a real dichotomy between unbounded dependencies with fillers in A(rgument) positions, e.g. tough constructions, and those whose fillers occupy non-argument (Abar) positions, e.g. topicalization. We first show that strong external evidence exists supporting the GPSG-internal prediction of full syntactic connectivity between Aposition fillers and their gap sites, but that this result seems contradicted by the existence of case conflict between the filler and gap. To overcome this contradiction, we introduce a new gap-licensing feature GAP, and show how a number of other divergences between A-and A-bar filler/gap constructions follow as a consequence.
INTRODUCTION 1The publication in 1977 of Chomsky's paper 'On wh-movement' marks the beginning of an era of remarkable consensus in linguistic theory, not only among transformational grammarians but throughout the emerging community of theorists committed to generative models of grammar in which transformations or equivalent processes play no role. Chomsky's claim that all unbounded dependency constructions (UDCs) behave uniformly with respect to certain logically independent syntactic criteria and therefore, by Ockham's razor, should be treated as a single species was central to the emergence of the Binding Theory of current transforma-*
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