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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 25, No. 0, pp.819-831
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2025
Received 23 Apr 2025 Revised 02 Jun 2025 Accepted 10 Jun 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.25..202506.819

Parasiticism Meets the Miracle Creed Framework

Myung-Kwan Park
Professor, Department of English Dongguk University Seoul, Korea parkmk@dongguk.edu


© 2025 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 investigates the licensing of parasitic gaps in English within the framework of Chomsky’s (2023) Miracle Creed (MC), which restricts Internal Merge (IM) to a single application per derivation. In this model, successive-cyclic movement is replaced by interface-driven accesses to a wh-phrase via phase heads. Focusing on parasitic gaps embedded within adjunct or subject phrases, we show that a single application of IM can yield a desired derived predicate through λ-abstraction, enabling predicate conjunction between the matrix v*P and the parasitic gap-containing adjunct or subject phrase, thus licensing the gap. However, certain cases challenge the sufficiency of this derivational procedure. To address these, we propose the traditional resumptive wh-strategy, in which a resumptive pro is bound by a wh-phrase internally merged at a higher phase edge. This strategy is compatible with the MC framework and provides a principled solution to apparent successive cyclic movement. Our findings support the MC model while highlighting the need for an auxiliary mechanism in structurally complex configurations.

Keywords:

single application of internal merge, successive-cyclic movement, parasitic gap, derived predicate, resumptive-wh

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