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In: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

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On a PP/DP asymmetry in extraction

Published online: 27 August 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.223.03bia
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.
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Gavarró, Anna
2020. Child Relativized Minimality and Grammaticality Judgement. Frontiers in Psychology 11 DOI logo
Wiślicki, Jan
2018. Quotation as a challenge for feature-driven phases: An argument for Zwart’s merge. The Linguistic Review DOI logo

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