1 GAPS, GHOSTS AND GAPLESS RELATIVES IN ... - ling.auf.net

Prepositional Inversion (with who moving from complement to specifier position within
PP), the relevant PP will violate the Edge Constraint. However, a number of recent analyses
have argued that who (in such structures) occupies a position outside the PP containing for.
For example, Culicover and Jackendoff (2005:272) maintain that who is positioned on the
edge of the clause, and that for is stranded internally within an in situ PP. Working within a
very different framework, Richards (1997, 2001), van Craenenbroeck (2004, 2010),
Hartman and Ai (2009) and Radford and Iwasaki (2012) argue that who is positioned on the
edge of a CP/ForceP projection, and for on the edge of a lower FocP projection. Under
either type of analysis, structures like (77) do not violate the Edge Constraint.
The final problem which we will consider here arises in relation to a possibility
which we earlier skipped over in relation to how Ghosting can apply to a structure such as
the following:
(43) [CP [PP which [P in] ] [C that] the Scotland players will raise their
game ]
We considered three well-formed outcomes which Ghosting can give rise to in (43), but
overlooked a fourth alternative. Suppose that the complementiser that is ghosted (in order
to ensure that CP doesn’t violate the Edge Constraint 31), and that the wh-pronoun which is
also ghosted, in order to ensure that the fronted PP does not violate the constraint either.
The structure resulting from this double application of Ghosting will be:
(78) [CP [PP [P in] ] [C ] the Scotland players will raise their
game ]
However, the resulting structure (which contains a preposition stranded in spec-PP at the
beginning of a clause) is ungrammatical (cf. *‘This is a match in the Scotland players will
raise their game’). This would seem to mean that the Ghosting analysis wrongly predicts
that we should find gapless relatives like (78) with a preposition stranded at the beginning
of a relative clause. Since structures like (78) are unattested in spoken or written English,
they provide a strong counterexample to the Ghosting analysis, do they not?
The answer is ‘Not if the ungrammaticality of structures like (78) can be attributed
to violation of an independent constraint.’ One possibility along these lines is that (78) is
ruled out by the same constraint that rules out what Postal (1972) called preposition
dangling in structures like (79b,c) below:
(79) a. Max is the only person [CP who I believe [CP Mary thinks [CP John talked to]]]
b. *Max is the only person [CP who I believe [CP Mary thinks [CP to John talked]]]
c. *Max is the only person [CP who I believe [CP to Mary thinks [CP John talked]]]
In all three sentences in (79), the italicised relative pronoun who originates as the object of
the bold-printed preposition to. In (79a), who undergoes wh-movement on its own, leaving
the preposition to stranded in situ. In (79b), the preposition to is pied-piped along with who
to the edge of the most deeply embedded CP, but then is left stranded in spec-CP in the
innermost clause when who subsequently moves on its own to the edge of the other two
bracketed CPs. In (79c), to is pied-piped along with who to the edge of the inner and
intermediate CPs, but then is left stranded on the edge of the intermediate CP when who
subsequently moves on its own to the edge of the outer CP. This raises the question of
whether structures like (78) are ruled out by the same constraint which bars structures like
(79b, c). But what kind of constraint might be involved?
One possible candidate is the following:
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