Remarks on de Vries’ (2013) Derivation of the Parasitic Gap Construction

Abstract

De Vries (2013) treats the parasitic gap construction (PGC) as an instance of external remerge (ER), thereby explaining the apparent island exemption property in terms of a ‘bypath’ due to a multi-dominance structure. The ER approach may have difficulty explaining at least two factual claims made in the literature: One is the so-called anti-reconstruction effect, originally due to Kearney (1983); and the other is the so-called deep island effect, originally due to Kayne (1983). The two restrictions are often taken as evidence for a null operator movement approach to the PGC (Chomsky 1986, Nissenbaum 2000, among others). The current work first points out that the first claim does not obtain, while the second does. To accommodate the newly provided generalization, this work suggests that the PGC involves IR within the adjunct clause prior to ER to the matrix clause, pace de Vries (2013), who ignores the first step of remerge.