That-trace effects and resumption – How Improper Movement can be repaired

Abstract

OutlineThe ungrammaticality that can be observed in subject extraction from that-clauses in English, known as the that-trace effect, has attracted much attention in generative grammar. Until today, most of the writing takes it for granted that the effect is directly connected to the placement or the role of the subject. In this article we will show that this is likely to be wrong. We will show on the basis of data from German that the that-trace effect emerges as the result of TOPIC EXTRACTION via the specifier of the complementizer that (SpecCP). Since subjects are very likely to serve as topics, and the grammar of English does not allow much variation in using other constituents as topics, it is understandable that the that-trace effect was taken to be a subject effect. The gist of our explanation of the that-trace effect is that constituents which have been moved to the topic position, more precisely to the position of an aboutness-topic, do not have a feature for contrastiveness, and that precisely such a feature is needed in long extraction to value a subfeature of the intermediate complementizer. 1 This requirement allows essentially only constituents from the rhematic part of the clause to move long distance.The article is organized as follows: Section 2 gives a short description of that-trace effects in English and comments on some more recent approaches. Section 3 turns to similar effects in German, pointing to means of circumventing the violation which are offered by the grammar of German. In this section it will be established that it is topic movement and not subject movement which gives rise to the observed violation. Making use of a feature of contrastivity, section 4 identifies the violation as related to what in previous research was seen as IMPROPER MOVEMENT. In section 5 the notorious problem of long extraction from zero-complementizer clauses will be addressed. Extending work that has been done on German, it will be argued there that also in English the construction is better analyzed as involving parenthetical insertion. In other words, what has been taken to be long subject extraction across a zero complementizer is in all likelihood short extraction into which a special parenthetical has been inserted. 2 In section 6 we shift from the discussion of English and Standard German to a discussion of Zurich German relative clauses. Relative clauses in this dialect are of particular interest because they show a split between movement and resumption. Subjects and direct objects move and leave a trace whereas indirect objects and PP-objects etc. rely on resumption. Interestingly, this picture changes as soon as we are dealing with long relativization. In the latter case, even subject and direct object submit to resumption. On the basis of the extraction theory developed that far, this change receives a natural explanation, the reason being that the relative operator -unlike the wh-operator in questions -cannot value the contrast-feature in comp. The result is repair by means of resumption. It will...

Emphatic Topicalization and the Structure of the Left Periphery: Evidence from German and Bangla

“…Topicalization of XP to Spec,CP has something to do with “contrastivity” in the sense that the XP's denotation is chosen from a set of alternatives (Bayer ). This rules out weak elements such as es ‘it’ and man (the impersonal indefinite ‘one’) as well as higher adverbs that lack contrastiveness such as leider ‘unfortunately’ (see Frey , Bayer & Salzmann , among others). However, XP movement to Spec,CP cannot be exhaustively subsumed under an information‐structural notion of “topic.” As Bayer () shows, it is compatible with newly introduced focal as well as with old‐information topical elements.…”

“…But note that in this case arguments in favor of long movement lose ground. Following the argumentation by Reis (1995) and Bayer & Salzmann (2013) for comparable German cases, what looks like the matrix clause may actually be a so-called integrated parenthetical. This analysis is supported by the fact that the parenthesis can follow a direct question as in (iii).…”

Constraints on Displacement

“…Simplifying a bit (and adapting it to current assumptions about clausal structure), it can be formulated as in (73 Furthermore, wh-island effects are generally ameliorated if the wh-clause is an infinitive and the moved item is a complement DP (see Chomsky (1986a) and Frampton (1990), among others). Thus, There is some disagreement as to whether topicalization in languages like English or German targets a specifier of C, or a specifier of some other functional category (perhaps a functional catgory Top, as suggested in Müller & Sternefeld (1993), Rizzi (1997), Bayer & Salzmann (2009), and much recent work), or, as has also been pro-posed, a specific adjunction position in the clausal domain. 47 For concreteness, suppose the first option is correct: Topicalization is movement to SpecC (in languages like English, Danish, and Icelandic, embedded topicalization then will have to involve CP recursion, given the presence of a complementizer above the topic).…”

“…I have argued that this is the case with topic vs. wh-islands in German: An interrogative C is equipped with more features than a declarative C that triggers topicalization. From this perspective, one may profitably look at other asymmetries between movement types; see, for instance, Bayer & Salzmann (2009) on the different behaviour of relativization in comparison to other movement types, and Müller & Sternefeld (1993) on asymmetries between topicalization, wh-movement, and scrambling. A further extension that suggests itself concerns finite/non-finite asymmetries in extraction (see Frampton (1990)).…”

A New Diagnostic for Cyclic Wh-Movement: Discourse Particles in German Questions

“…For more recent discussion of VIPs, seeBayer and Salzmann 2013, Pankau, Thiersch, and Würzner 2010, and Viesel 2011, and for experimental explorations, seeKiziak 2010. …”