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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 23, No. 0, pp.1060-1076
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 30 Jan 2023
Received 18 Aug 2023 Revised 31 Aug 2023 Accepted 04 Nov 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.23..202311.1060

On Repair of the Subject Condition Violations by Parasitic Gaps

Sun-woong Kim ; Gui-Sun Moon ; Seunghan Shin ; Inam Ullah
(First Author) Professor, Department of English and Industry Kwangwoon University swkim@kw.ac.kr
(Corresponding Author) Professor Emeritus, School of Creative Humanities, English Language Studies Hansung University sunmoon@hansung.ac.kr
(Co-author) Professor, Department of English and Industry Kwangwoon University sshan@kw.ac.kr
(Co-author) Doctoral Student, Department of English and Industry Kwangwoon University mhnomi77@gmail.com


© 2023 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper discusses the claim that parasitic gaps can repair otherwise ungrammatical strings to make them better. Culicover and Winkler (2022) argue that the so-called repair by parasitic gaps (RPG) effect is nothing but a syntactic illusion; rather, it should be perceived as a mechanism aimed at diminishing the burden of more resource-intensive processing. They demonstrate that grammaticality is enhanced by replacing the real gap in the subject with a parasitic gap and placing the real gap in a position previously occupied by the "uninvited guest" in the matrix clause. This paper shows that their uninvited guest hypothesis has both over and undergeneration problems. To overcome the difficulties, this paper argues that syntactic analysis is more plausible from derivational perspectives. In particular, this paper proposes that the derivationally dynamic phasehood can provide a better solution to the effect that can further cover the examples with strong island constraints like the LBC and the Adjunct Condition. In the end, if the findings of this paper prove to be accurate, it contributes to the ongoing endeavor of integrating discourse-pragmatic factors into syntax. This integration leads to what can be seen as syntacticization, representing an advanced stage of autonomous syntax.

Keywords:

repair by parasitic gaps, subject, processing cost, uninvited guest, dynamic phasehood, discourse-pragmatic factors, syntacticization

Acknowledgments

The earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2023 Summer Conference of KASELL at Korea University. The authors owe much to the audience for their questions and comments. Special thanks go to two anonymous reviewers of Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics. This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2022S1A5A2A01038247) to the first author

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