Gaps and Dummies
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Hans Bennis Gaps and Dummies 3a Amsterdam Academic Archive gaps and dummies The Amsterdam Academic Archive is an initiative of Amsterdam University Press. The series consists of scholarly titles which were no longer available, but which are still in demand in the Netherlands and abroad. Relevant sections of these publications can also be found in the repository of Amsterdam University Press: www.aup.nl/repository. At the back of this book there is a list of all the AAA titles published in 2005. Hans Bennis Gaps and Dummies 3a Amsterdam Academic Archive Gaps and Dummies was originally published as a PhD-dissertation in 1986 at the Katholieke Hogeschool Tilburg. It later appeared in the Linguistic Models-series from Foris Publications, Dordrecht (isbn 90 6765 245 8). Cover design: René Staelenberg, Amsterdam isbn 90 5356 859 x nur 616 © Amsterdam University Press • Amsterdam Academic Archive, 2005 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. preface for the AAA-edition Gaps and Dummies was originally published as a PhD-dissertation in 1986 (defense May 1986). In addition to the dissertation version, it has appeared as a book in the series Lin- guistic Models, volume 9, with Foris Publications (second printing in 1987). Later, the series Linguistic Models has been taken over by Mouton de Gruyter (Berlin, New York). Although the book has appeared in various versions, the text is in all cases identical to the original dissertation version, which was camera-ready produced on a Commodore- 64 computer and a daisy-wheel printer. Gaps and Dummies has received a lot of attention nationally and internationally due to the fact that it addressed a very central theme in generative linguistics, the nature of the subject. The central questions in the book were directed towards the formal status of the subject: is the presence of a subject a consequence of structural or thematic proper- ties? If syntactic structure itself determines the presence of a subject position in a clause, it follows that all clauses have subject positions; given the fact that positions should be detectable, the consequence is that sentences without thematic subjects must have dummy subjects. Sentences without a thematic subject and without a lexical dummy subject must have empty dummy subjects consequently. It thus leads to the postulation of linguistic objects that have neither form nor interpretation. This view was formulat- ed in the Extended Projection Principle, the dominant perspective in generative theory within the Government-Binding framework in the nineteen-eighties, and is nowadays still present in the minimalist framework of generative syntax, in more or less the same way. The other perspective is that the presence of a subject is determined by independent linguistic principles. If the verb or construction requires an external argument lexically, the projection of arguments into syntactic structure makes sure that a subject is pres- ent. This subject might be lexically empty in the case of prodrop languages. Another arguable instance of subjects being present is the case in which thematic noun phrases that are not projected as subjects will be promoted to become subjects due to Case rea- sons. This situation occurs in the case of passive, ergative and raising constructions. This view leads to a position in which there are no lexical or empty dummy subjects as place holders for an absent or demoted thematic subject. More generally, it follows that there are no dummy pronouns. This was the view advocated in Gaps and Dummies. The dis- cussion on these two different views has attracted a lot of attention. Another reason for Gaps and Dummies to receive attention in the literature is the fact that it contains a detailed discussion of the two potential dummy pronouns in Dutch: the adverbial pronoun er and the neuter pronoun het. In order to show the correctness of the approach in which dummy pronouns do not exist, it had to be demonstrated that apparent dummy pronouns are referential pronouns instead. Chapter 2 ('Het as a refer- ential expression') and Chapter 3 ('The adverbial pronoun er') show in detail that a view in which apparent dummy pronouns are taken to be referential has a number of inter- esting consequences and is preferable to the dummy perspective. v These two chapters are still often referred to in the literature. Especially the argu- ments to show that there are no dummy object pronouns have been generally adopted in Dutch linguistics. The discussion about the extremely complex pronoun er in Chap- ter 3 is still relevant for contempory work on Dutch syntax. Given the fact that Gaps and Dummies is both theoretically and empirically relevant for present-day linguistics, I welcome the possibility to include this book in the AAA-series of Amsterdam University Press. Hans Bennis Meertens Instituut (knaw), Amsterdam October 2005 vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Gaps and Parasitic Gaps 7 1.1 Introduction 7 1.2 Connectedness 8 1.2.1 Kayne's g-projection 8 1.2.2 Two modifications of Kayne's g-projection 11 1 .2.3 Extraction from complement clauses 15 1.3 Complex cases of PPs 18 1 .3.1 Van Riemsdijk's analysis of P-stranding 19 1.3.2 Adjacency and P-stranding 21 1.3.3 Extraction from complex PPs 25 1. 3.4 Reanalysis in complex PPs 29 1.4 Parasitic gaps 39 1.5 Parasitic gaps in Dutch 44 1 .5. 1 The distribution of parasitic gaps 44 1.5.2 Parasitic gaps without real gaps 54 1.6 Chains and features 71 1.7 An alternative approach to parasitic gaps in Dutch 79 1. 7.1 The analysis of Huybregts and Van Riemsdijk 1. 7 . 2 An argument against our analysis "82 1 .7.3 Parallelism between across-the-board and 83 parasitic-gap constructions Notes 88 2. Het as a referential expression 93 2.1 Introduction 93 2.2 Weather-het 95 2.3 Referential properties of the dummy pronoun het 98 2.4 Het and sentential complements "3 2.4.1 Het in object position "3 Table of Contents 2.4.2 Het in subject position 10' 2.5 Het-Raising 110 2.6 Bisentential verbs 116 2.7 Het in Small-Clause constructions 12' 2.8 Het and ergative verbs 131 2.9 Psychological verbs 134 2. Hl Inversion phenomena 146 2.10. 1 Previous proposals 147 2.10.2 Inversion and the Extended Projection Principle 151 2.10·3 Het and Inversion 160 2.11 Summary 163 Notes 165 3. The adverbial pronoun er 171 3.1 Introduction 171 3.2 The distribution of er 174 3.2.1 EXistential/expletive er 174 3.2.2 Prepositional er 176 3.2.3 Quantitative er 177 3.2.4 Locative er 177 3.2.5 Co-occurrence of syntactic functions of er 178 3.2.6 An analysis of co-occurrence 181 3.3 Categorial status and derivation 188 3.3.1 The categorial status of prepositional R-pronouns 188 3.3·2 Movement of prepositional R-pronouns 195 3.3·3 The syntax of locative er 197 3.3·4 Quantitative er as a non-thematic argument 198 3.4 R-movement and the double-R-constraint 205 3.4.1 Van Riemsdijk' s double-R-constraint 206 3.4.2 R-movement and adjunction 207 3.5 Expletive er: a dummy pronoun? 211 3.5.1 The distribution of expletive er 212 3.5·2 Syntactic analyses of the construction with 217 expletive er 3.5.3 Pragmatic motivation of er-insertion 221 3.5.3.1 Pragmatic principles governing the application 222 of adjunction 3.5.3.2 Pragmatic principles and expletive er 224 Table of Contents 3.6 Er and wh-movement 228 3.6.1 Dat-l phenomena 229 3.6.1.1 Previous accounts 229 3.6.1 .2 Subject extraction 'nd th, G,p Condition 239 3.6.1.3 Subject extraction 'nd the EPC 243 3.6.2 Subject extraction in main clauses 247 3.7 Conclusion 248 Notes 250 4. Some related topics 259 4.1 Introduction 259 4.2 Adjunction and Connection 260 4.3 The external argument and the structure of 267 Modern English 4.4 The structure of Old English and its development 275 into Modern English 4.4. 1 The structure of Old English 276 4.4.1.1 P-stranding 276 4.4. 1 .2 That-! configurations 281 4.4.1.3 Impersonal constructions 282 4.4.2 Development into Modern English: 291 the INfL parameter 4.5 Some remarks on the structure of the 295 Romance languages 4.5.1 The postverbal subject in Spanish 296 4.5.2 Stylistic Inversion in French 297 4.5 _3 The structure of Italian and the syntax of ne 301 4.6 The pronoun es in German 308 4.7 It as a referential expression 312 4.8 Concluding remarks 317 Notes 319 References 329 Acknowledgements So many people have -directly or indirectly- contributed by their presence, friendship and thinking to this book and more generally to my pleasure and interest in linguistics that I cannot even begin to try to acknowledge their support by mentioning their names here, for I am bound to forget one or the other. Instead, I shall single out the three people who have contributed most to this book.