Notes on computational linguistics.pdf - UCLA Department of ...

Stabler - Lx 185/209 2003
10.6 Some remaining issues
10.6.1 Locality
When phrasal movement was defined in §9.1 on page 170, it will be recalled that we only allowed the operation
to apply to a structure with a +f head and exactly 1 -f constituent. 48 We mentioned that this restriction is a
simple, strong version of a kind of “shortest move constraint” in the sense that each -f constituent must move
to the first available +f position. If there are two -f constituents in any structure, this requirement cannot
be met. This is also a kind of “relativized minimality” condition in the sense that the domains of movement
are relativized by the inventory of categories (Rizzi, 1990). A -wh constituent cannot get by any other -wh
constituent, but it can, for example, get by a -k constituent.
Notice that while this constraint allows a wh element to move to the front of a relative clause,
the man whoi you like ti visited us yesterday
it properly blocks moving another wh-element out, e.g. forming a question by questioning the subject you:
*whoj did the man whoi tj like ti visited us yesterday * the man whoi I read a statement whichj tj was about
ti is sick
When this impossiblity of extracting out of a complex phrase like the man who you like was observed by
Ross (1967), he observed that extraction out of complex determiner phrases is quite generally blocked, even
when there are (apparently) no other movements of the same kind (and not only in English). For example, the
following should not be accepted:
*whoi did the man with ti visit us
* the hat whichi I believed the claim that Otto was wearing ti is red
How can we block these? The SMC is apparently too weak, and needs to be strengthened. (We will see below
that the SMC is also too strong.)
Freezing
Wexler, Stepanov, et al.
10.6.2 Multiple movements and resumptive pronouns
In other respects, the SMC restriction is too strong. In English we have cases like (22a), though it is marginal
for many speakers (Fodor, 1978; Pesetsky, 1985):
(22) a. ?? Which violins1 did you say which sonatas2 were played t2 on t1
b. * Which violins1 did you say which sonatas2 were played t1 on t2
The example above is particularly troubling, and resembles (23a) famously observed by Huang (1982):
(23) a. ? [Which problem]i do you wonder howj to solve ti tj?
b. * Howj do you wonder [which problem]i to solve ti tj?
It seems that in English, extraction of two wh-elements is possible (at least marginally) if an argument whphrase
moves across an adjunct wh-phrase, but it is notably worse if the adjunct phrase extracts across an
argument phrase. We could allow the first example if wh-Adverbs have a different feature than wh-DPs, but
then we would allow the second example too. If there is really an argument-adjunct asymmetry here, it would
apparently require some kind of fundamental change in the nature of our SMC.
Developing insights from Obenauer (1983), Cinque (1990), Baltin (1992) and others, Rizzi (2000) argues that
what is really happening here is that certain wh-elements, like the wh-DP in a above, can be related to their
traces across another wh-element when they are “referential” in a certain sense. This moves the restriction on
movement relations closer to “binding theory,” which will be discussed in §11. (Similarly semantic accounts
have been offered by many linguists.
48 In our implementation, we actually do not even build a representation of any constituent which has two -f parts, for any f.
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