Extraction in Head‐driven Phrase Structure Grammar1

Abstract

AbstractExtraction is treated in Head‐driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) as a series of linked identities, enforced by a small number of interacting constraints, in the specification of a syntactic feature, slash. HPSG's monostratal formalism ensures that this strictly local determination of slash identities connects the relevant morphosyntactic properties of the filler to those imposed by conditions at the gap site. This connectivity mechanism operates in precisely the same manner whether the filler is linked to a single gap site or several, thus yield strictly parallel treatments for single and multiple gap phenomena, respectively. The inherently local nature of HPSG's connectivity mechanism is supported by data from languages in which all clausal levels in filler/gap pathways are flagged by grammatical effects restricted to such pathways. Interruption in connectivity, familiar in syntax as ‘island’ effects, are regarded as outside the formal combinatorics of the syntax itself, as argued in an increasingly broad and deep literature documenting the origins of these effects in real‐time processing, pragmatic and other functional aspects of linguistic cognition. And this simple characterization of extraction connectivity is compatible with a review of arguments that purport to argue for a heterogeneous characterization of extraction constructions, but which prove to lack empirical motivation. Nonetheless, despite a homogeneous connectivity mechanism, extraction constructions differ from each other idiosyncratically in many respects, and these idiosyncrasies are the subject of much ongoing research in HPSG.