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English Right Dislocation PACLIC 29 English Right Dislocation Kohji Kamada Chiba University 1-33, Yayoicho, Inage Ward, Chiba-shi, Chiba, 263-8522 Japan [email protected]/[email protected] (2) *That they spoke to the janitor about that Abstract robbery yesterday is terrible, the cops . (Ross, 1986: 258) A number of researchers claim that the derivation of the Right Dislocation Construction (RDC) involves movement (e.g., However, there is a construction that violates the Chung, 2012, for Korean; Ott & de Vries, 2012, RRC but is still acceptable, as seen in (3). 2015, for Dutch and German; Tanaka, 2001 and Abe, 2004, for Japanese; Whitman, 2000, for (3) [That they spoke to the janitor about that English, Japanese, and Korean). However, the robbery yesterday] is terrible, I mean, the RDC in English does not obey movement cops. (Whitman, 2000: 450) constraints such as the Coordinate Structure Constraint and the Left Branch Condition; that The sentence in (3) differs from that in (2) only in is, there are acceptable sentences that seem to that it has I mean inserted between the preceding violate these movement constraints. This suggests that the derivation of the English RDC clause and the dislocated element. This suggests should not involve movement. The present that the derivation of the RDC should at least not 2 paper demonstrates that some syntactic involve rightward movement. Note that the properties of the English RDC can be explained relevant pronoun is not a “resumptive” pronoun instead through the interaction of independently that repairs an island violation; it would otherwise motivated parsing strategies with a licensing be difficult to account for the unacceptability of the condition for adjoined elements. example in (2), in which the pronoun seems to play no role in repairing the violation of the RRC. 3 Further acceptable examples that appear to 1 Introduction violate movement constraints exist, as in (4). The Right Dislocation Construction (RDC) is a construction in which a dislocated NP appearing in (4) a. I saw Mary and him downtown yesterday, sentence-final position refers to a pronoun, as your friend from Keokuk . observed in example (1), with the relevant pronoun (Ross, 1986: 260) in italics and the dislocated NP in boldface. b. I noticed his car in the driveway last night, your friend from Keokuk . (ibid .) (1) He is real smart, John . In (4), it is possible to connect the dislocated NPs As (2) shows, the dislocated NP cannot occur with him and his , respectively. If the dislocated NP outside the embedded clause that contains the in (4a) were extracted from the position occupied relevant pronoun. This seems to suggest that the by the pronoun him , a conjunct could be moved. dislocated NP is derived by movement, because a Likewise in (4b), if the dislocated NP were violation of a movement constraint—namely, the extracted from the position occupied by his , an Right Roof Constraint (RRC)—appears to be present (Ross, 1986: 179). 1 2 An example of the type in (3) was originally provided by Tsubomoto (1995), who argues against a movement analysis for the RDC and accounts for some of its properties in terms of information structure. 3 If movement were involved in the derivation of the RDC and 1 Another possibility is a violation of the Sentential Subject the relevant pronoun were a resumptive pronoun, the RRC Constraint. would be a condition on a representation. 221 29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation pages 221 - 230 Shanghai, China, October 30 - November 1, 2015 Copyright 2015 by Kohji Kamada PACLIC 29 element could be moved out of the specifier demonstrate that it fails to account for several position of the NP. properties of the English RDC. Irrespective of whether an element moves Whitman (2000) follows Kayne (1994) in rightward or leftward, however, English observes claiming that a sentence like that in (1) is derived the Coordinate Structure Constraint (CSC) and the from the biclausal structure shown in (7), as in (8). Left Branch Condition (LBC), as shown in (5) and (6), respectively. (7) XP (5) a. * What sofa i will he put the chair between CP 1 XP some table and ti? (ibid .: 97) b. *I saw Mary and ti downtown yesterday, He is real smart [e] CP 2 your friend from Keokuk i. (ibid .: 260) John is real smart (6) a. * Whose i did you steal ti money? (adapted from Whitman, 2000: 452) (McCawley, 1998: 526) b. *I noticed ti car in the driveway last night, (8) [ CP1 He is real smart], John i, [ CP2 ti is real smart] your friend from Keokuk i. (Ross, 1986: 260) As (8) shows, John is left-adjoined/dislocated to If the derivation of the RDC involved rightward CP 2, and the remaining elements (i.e., the movement in any way, the examples in (4) would underlined parts) are deleted under an identity violate the movement constraints, resulting in condition, thereby generating (1). 5,6 unacceptability—contrary to the actual situation. According to Whitman (2000), the RRC effect Furthermore, the examples in (4) suggest that the displayed in (2) is explained as follows: As in (1), derivation of the RDC involves no rightward (2) is formed by first conjoining two clauses, and 4 movement. then, as shown in (9), the cops is extracted from This paper is structured as follows. In section 2, the sentential subject in CP 2 to adjoin to the left I argue that the derivation of the RDC involves no side of CP 2. This extraction, however, violates the movement, by pointing out empirical problems Sentential Subject Constraint, resulting in the RRC with the argument by Whitman (2000), who claims effect. that the derivation of the RDC in English involves the operation of deletion after leftward movement. (9) *[ CP1 That they spoke to the janitor about that In section 3, I first set out a number of robbery yesterday] is terrible, [the cops] i, [ CP2 independently motivated principles, such as [that ti spoke to the janitor about that robbery parsing principles and a licensing condition for yesterday] is terrible]. (Whitman, 2000: 458) adjoined elements, and then I demonstrate that the interaction of the licensing condition with these However, the analysis above is empirically principles can account for the cases with which problematic, because (3) would be excluded in the movement analyses fail to cope. Section 4 concludes the paper. 5 Whitman (2000) claims that his analysis is also applicable to the RDC in Japanese and Korean. Similar proposals are made 2 Problems with a Biclausal + Deletion by, e.g., Chung (2012) for Korean, Ott and de Vries (2012, Analysis 2015) for Dutch and German, and Endo (1996), Tanaka (2001) and Abe (2003) for Japanese. What these proposals have in In the previous section, I discussed certain common is that the RDC has a biclausal structure and empirical problems with rightward movement undergoes left-adjoinment to the second clause before deletion analyses. In this section, I take up Whitman (2000) under an identity condition. Hence, the application of these approaches to English RDCs will face similar sorts of as an example of leftward movement analyses, and empirical problems to those Whitman (2000) does. 6 The identity condition is not clearly defined in Whitman (2000). Incidentally, Ott and de Vries (2012) follow Merchant 4 It is assumed that the CSC and the LBC are regarded as (2001) in assuming that “the deleted domain in CP 2 and its conditions on movement rather than on representations. antecedent domain in CP 1 must be semantically equivalent….” 222 PACLIC 29 7 same way as (2) is. Furthermore, the analysis is (12) *The one who [topic-comment structure i not adequate to account for the examples in (4). doesn’t understand ti] is me. That is, your friend from Keokuk (’s ) would be (adapted from Gundel, 1988: 151) extracted from the respective second clauses [ I saw Mary and your friend from Keokuk downtown Hence, the structure in (11b) would not be yesterday ] and [I noticed your friend from appropriate either. Keokuk’s car in the driveway last night ]. These The biclausal + deletion analysis might claim extractions, however, violate the CSC and the LBC, that the internal structure of the embedded clause as discussed in section 1. Thus, the biclausal + in (10) is different from that of the relative clause deletion analysis also cannot account for the in a sentence like (12). If so, the analysis would be acceptability of the examples in (4) (see footnote unable to cope with an unacceptable example such 4). 8 as (13), in which the embedded clause appears to Moreover, the biclausal + deletion analysis faces have the same structure as that in (10). another empirical problem. (13) *Bill gave the girl who [ate it , the potato (10) The girl who ate it , the potato salad , was salad ], a dollar. rushed to the hospital. 9 (Gundel, 1988: 132) Thus, biclausal + deletion analyses such as that of The example in (10) shows that the RDC is Whitman (2000) have empirical problems. On the possible inside an embedded clause. 10 There are at basis of the discussion in sections 1 and 2 here, it least two possible ways for (10) to be derived seems safe to say that the derivation of the English under the analysis in question. The relevant RDC does not involve movement (i.e., that the possible structures corresponding to that in (8) RDC is base-generated). before deletion takes place would be those in (11), with the content of CP 1 in (11a) ignored. 3 A Base-Generation Analysis 3.1 Parsing strategies (11) a. [CP1 … ], the potato salad i [CP2 the girl who ate ti was rushed to the hospital] Concerning a parsing strategy, I follow Pritchett b.
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