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The Comp-trace effect, the adverb effect and minimal CP

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2002

NICHOLAS SOBIN
NICHOLAS SOBIN
Affiliation:
University of Wales, Bangor
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Abstract

Recent work has ascribed the adverb effect, the reduction or elimination of the that-trace effect by the addition of an adverbial phrase, to an elaborated CP layer. However, additional observations about a variety of adverb effects with both positive and negative effects on acceptability, including some experimental data, suggest that (i) adverbs may undergo lexical adjunction to a complementizer and (ii) the CP layer may be contracting or folding in rather than expanding. This proposal facilitates explanation of an array of facts including the Comp-trace effect, the adverb effect and other aspects of the behavior of complementizers in relative constructions and in complement constructions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , November 2002 , pp. 527 - 560
Copyright
2002 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I am most grateful to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT and to the Department of Linguistics at Harvard University for their incomparable hospitality during my tenure as a visiting scholar at each institution during fall 1996. Special thanks are also due the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs at UALR and its director Andy Covington for partial support of my stay in Cambridge. In addition, my sincere thanks to Steve Anderson, Bob Borsley, Noam Chomsky, Sam Epstein, Byrd Gibbens, Greg Iverson, Jay Keyser, Howard Lasnik, Jim Levernier, Carson Schütze and Anne Marie Sobin for discussing various matters related to this work. I would also like to thank the anonymous JL referees for their numerous insightful comments which helped to sharpen my thinking at many points. I also thank audiences at LASSO-UCLA, the University of Missouri-Columbia, and the Linguistics Association of Great Britain for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this work. Any errors are solely those of the author. Finally, many thanks to the students who either participated as subjects in this research or who carried out similar research of their own. Their work and enthusiasm are invaluable.