Nouns and Noun Phrases - University of Macau Library

Syntactic uses of noun phrases 1057
(12) a. Wati zei Jan [dat hij ti gelezen had]?
what said Jan that he read had
‘What did Jan say that he had read?’
b. Wati denk je [dat je ti voor je verjaardag zal krijgen]?
what think you that you for your birthday will get
‘What do you think that you will get for you birthday?’
It has been argued that in many languages there is an asymmetry between
subjects and objects (as well as other non-subjects) with respect to this kind of
“long” wh-movement. Whereas objects can undergo long movement, subjects
cannot unless the language has some special proviso that makes this movement
possible: Whoi do you think (*that) ti came, for example, shows that dropping the
complementizer that makes extraction of the subject possible in English. In
traditional generative grammar this led to the empirical generalization that a
complementizer cannot be followed by a subject trace, which was formulated as the
°Complementizer-trace Filter in (13), in which C and ti stand for, respectively, the
complementizer and the trace of the subject.
(13) Complementizer-trace Filter: *[ ... C ti ...].
At first sight, Dutch seems well-behaved with respect to this filter: whereas the
examples in (12) are fully grammatical, example (14a) is marked (although not as
bad as its English translation with the overt complementizer that). On closer
inspection, however, it turns out that the acceptability of examples of this sort is
influenced by the type of noun phrase: °D-linked noun phrases like welke jongen do
not readily allow this movement whereas non-D-linked noun phrases like wie do.
(14) a. ? Welke jongeni denk je [dat ti het boek zal krijgen]?
which boy think you that the book will get
‘Which boy do you think (*that) will get the book?’
b. Wiei denk je [dat ti het boek zal krijgen]?
who think you that the book will get
‘Who do you think (*that) will get the book?’
A possible reason for the difference in acceptability of these two examples may be
that, despite appearances, the traces of the two wh-phrases do not occupy the same
position in the clause. This can be made clearer by considering embedded clauses
that do not contain a definite object, like those in (15).
(15) a. ?? Welke jongeni denk je [dat (er) ti heeft gelogen]?
which boy think you that there has lied
‘Which boy do you think (*that) has lied?’
b. Wiei denk je [dat *(er) ti heeft gelogen]?
who think you that there has lied
‘Who do you think (*that) has lied?’
As can be seen in (15b), the example with wie requires that the embedded clause
contain the expletive er. Since the expletive normally precedes the indefinite subject
(cf. Gisteren heeft er iemand gelogen ‘Yesterday, someone lied’) and can therefore