Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

UCLA

UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations bannerUCLA

Perspectives on Syntactic Dependencies

Abstract

This dissertation examines how intensional content, i.e., belief ascription, constrains antecedent- gap chains. I defend the proposal that antecedent-gap chains are intensionally uniform: the an- tecedent and the gap must refer to the same thing. The core focus is defective intervention in antecedent-gap chains(Chomsky, 2000, 2001). Previous accounts have attributed defective inter- vention to syntactic mechanisms (Chomsky, 2001; Nevins, 2004; Preminger, 2014). These ac- counts are shown to be at best entirely stipulative and at worst empirically inadequate.

I make two new generalizations concerning defective intervention. The first is that defective interveners are all attitude holders. I support this generalization by closely examining the class of tough-predicates, which permit various kinds of arguments to be projected in the syntax between the antecedent and the gap. The second generalization is that defective intervention only arises when the antecedent-gap chain connects two thematic positions. Again, I justify this generalization by looking closely at the tough-construction, which has itself inspired decades of research. I illustrate that the antecedent-gap chain in the tough-construction is “mitigated” by beliefs, deriving where the tough-construction appears, and why it appears.

The two core theoretical results of this dissertation are, I) a principled and an explanatory ac- count of defective intervention, II) a principled and explanatory account of the tough-construction.

Main Content
For improved accessibility of PDF content, download the file to your device.
Current View