ON THE DISUNITY OF UNBOUNDED DEPENDENCY CONSTRUCTIONS

Since Noam Chomsky's 1977 paper 'On wh-movement', syntactic theorists almost universally have assumed that tough/too/enough constructions are to be treated by the same formal mechanism as wh-extraction constructions, in spite of well-known syntactic divergences between the two types. We argue that these divergences reflect a real dichotomy between unbounded dependencies with fillers in A(rgument) positions, e.g. tough constructions, and those whose fillers occupy non-argument (A-bar) positions, e.g. topicalization. We first show that strong external evidence exists supporting the GPSG-internal prediction of full syntactic connectivity between Aposition fillers and their gap sites, but that this result seems contradicted by the existence of case conflict between the filler and gap. To overcome this contradiction, we introduce a new gap-licensing feature GAP, and show how a number of other divergences between A- and A-bar filler/gap constructions follow as a consequence. © 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers.