title: Syntactic Change in the Parallel Architecture: The Case of Parasitic Gaps.
abstract: In Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture, the well-formed expressions of a language are licensed by correspondences between phonology, syntax, and conceptual structure. I show how this architecture can be used to make sense of the existence of parasitic gap constructions. A parasitic gap is one that is rendered acceptable because of the presence of another gap in the same sentence. Compare *a person whoi everyone who talks to ti likes Chris, which shows an illicit extraction from a relative clause, and a person whoi everyone who talks to pgi likes ti, which shows a parasitic gap in the relative clause. Languages differ in terms of the range of configurations in which they allow parasitic gaps; these configurations appear to form a hierarchy. These observations raise some fundamental questions: Why do parasitic gaps exist at all? Why are different syntactic configurations possible for P-gaps and why just these configurations? Why is there a parasitic gap hierarchy? The answers that I propose make crucial use of constructional overgeneralization of across-the-board extraction in coordinate constructions, formulated straightforwardly in the framework of Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture.
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University.
authors.forename: Peter W
authors.initials: PW
authors.lastname: Culicover
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008037:Linguistics
keywords: Constructions; Language acquisition; Language change; Language variation; Parallel Architecture; Parasitic gaps; Syntactic theory