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Part of
Structures, Strategies and Beyond: Studies in honour of Adriana Belletti
Edited by Elisa Di Domenico, Cornelia Hamann and Simona Matteini
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 223] 2015
► pp. 47–66

On a PP/DP asymmetry in extraction

Preverbal subject DPs in English seem to allow for the extraction of a PP complement, but not of a DP complement stranding the preposition of. Assuming a top-down computation, we argue that an extracted PP cannot be re-merged within a criterial preverbal subject (in the sense of Rizzi 2006), but it can be re-merged within a non-criterial subject that has undergone full reconstruction. This ‘delayed remerge’ implies that in the preverbal position, the selectional requirement of the N head for a PP complement is not computed yet. This immediately accounts for the impossibility of P-stranding within a preverbal subject: the presence of the preposition implies that the computation of the N’s selectional requirement has not been delayed.

Keywords: categorical, extraction, pied piping, P-stranding, subject islands, thetic, top-down computation
Published online: 27 August 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.223.03bia
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