Complementizer-gap phenomena

Syntactic or pragmatic constraints?

John Löwenadler | Gothenburg University

Since Perlmutter (1971) the complementizer-gap effect has received much attention in linguistic research. This article investigates the solution presented in Van Valin (2005) which states that the phenomenon should be explained in pragmatic rather than syntactic terms. Using data from Swedish and several other languages I will argue that such a solution is unlikely to be correct, and that the English and Swedish facts are better explained by referring to available syntactic constructions. My conclusion is that in a cross-linguistic perspective restrictions on subject extraction must be regarded as a very heterogeneous phenomenon, and in order to explain the empirical data I will suggest a number of competing motivations related to the Accessibility Hierarchy, argument linking and syntactic templates.

Published online: 21 November 2008
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.105.26low

Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Löwenadler, John

2015. Relative clause extraction: Pragmatic dominance, processing complexity and the nature of crosslinguistic variation. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 38:1 ► pp. 37 ff.

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