The topicalization construction discussed in some detail in the previous chapter is only one of a wide variety of unbounded dependency phenomena in which a filler must be linked to a gap site. One can cluster these phenomena into two major groups, on grounds we discuss below, with a third group falling somewhere between the two, showing certain properties of both. For several decades all of these constructions linking fillers to gap site have been regarded as embodiments of a single connectivity mechanism – a view allowing a considerable simplification in syntacticians’ picture of the licensing conditions on natural language grammars. But what is the basis for this assumption?
The very earliest form taken by the argument for a unitary filler/gap mechanism shared by all unbounded dependencies was based on a particular set of constraints, or restrictions, to which all constructions embodying that mechanism were sensitive. In a very influential paper, Chomsky (1977) argued along these lines for an approach in which a single movement operation underlay all types of extraction phenomena. In the previous chapter, we've seen some instances of these constructions and noted that in certain languages they all display the same grammatical behavior in marking the intermediate substructures between fillers and gap sites in some special manner. We now look more systematically at the form of these various constructions, prior to a survey of the supposed syntactic constraints that they were thought to obey. The theoretical development of this set of constraints, and the attempt to derive them as effects from ever more abstract and general principles, is arguably the driving force behind most of the developments in syntactic theory from the mid-1970s on. We conclude with a review of the empirical status of the constraints themselves, and consequences of more recent research in this domain for syntax as a field of inquiry and as a component of the grammars of human languages.
Extraction Constructions in English
Fillers in Topic Position
The constructions we consider in this section are similar to topicalization in a crucial respect: they display a constituent at the left edge of the clause which is linked to an arbitrarily distant gap site.
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