Weak Connectivity in (Un)bounded Dependency Constructions

Weak Connectivity in (Un)bounded Dependency Constructions∗ Yong-Beom Kim Kwangwoon University, Seoul , Korea ybkim@kw.ac.kr Abstract. This paper argues that various kinds of displaced structures in English should be licensed by a more explicitly formulated type of rule schema in order to deal with what is called weak connectivity in English. This paper claims that the filler and the gap site cannot maintain the total identity of features but a partial overlap since the two positions need to obey the structural forces that come from occupying respective positions. One such case is the missing object construction where the subject fillers and the object gaps are to observe requirements that are imposed on the respective positions. Others include passive constructions and topicalized structures. In this paper, it is argued that the feature discrepancy comes from the different syntactic positions in which the fillers are assumed to be located before and after displacement. In order to capture this type of mismatch, syntactically relevant features are handled separately from the semantically motivated features in order to deal with the syntactically imposed requirements. Keywords: Weak connectivity, feature mismatch, missing object construction, passives, topicalized construction, filler, gap, unbounded dependency. 1. Introduction This paper attempts to deal with filler-gap mismatches found in what Pollard and Sag (1994) calls the weak unbounded dependency construction. One of the key issues in the construction is that there is a feature or category mismatch between the filler and gap, as shown in (1). (1) a. That John will help us is hard for us to rely on ___. b. That Chomsky might be wrong is hard to think of _____. Prepositions like on or of would normally be subcategorized to take a nominal complement, but in (1) the filler site for the corresponding gap is occupied by a that clause, which would pose a puzzle to a constraint-based analysis as well as to a minimalist approach. This kind of mismatch is not peculiar to the missing object construction (MOC, hereafter). The same kind of mismatch can also be found in a topicalized construction as shown in (2). (2) a. That some passives lack active counterparts, no theory can capture ____. b. *No theory can capture that some passives lack active counterparts. c. That some passives lack active counterparts, few teachers were aware of ___. The verb capture does not take as its complement a that clause in an ordinary construction as shown in (2b), but in a topicalized construction like (2a), a that clause can initiate the construction with the same verb governing the gap site. This kind of weak connectivity is not restricted to the above two constructions. It can be found in passives as well. (3) a. That some passives lack active counterparts can be captured by no theory. b. That Chomsky might be wrong has never been thought of ___. ∗ Copyright 2007 by Yong-Beom Kim 234 cf. No one has ever thought (*of) that Chomsky might be wrong. c. That John will help us may not be …

Content truncated to 500 words