Tokens vs. copies: displacement revisited

In this paper we will analyze the conceptual and computational motivations of the property of displacement in natural languages from a revisited perspective. We will account for displacement phenomena proposing our own version of displacement‐as‐external token Merge, as opposed to the traditional displacement‐as‐literal movement or, more recently, displacement‐as‐copy and Merge (Chomsky 1995; Kitahara 1997; Nunes 2004). As far as empirical data is concerned, we will provide a brief analysis of parasitic gaps and their derivation, comparing our proposal with previous accounts making particular stress on the idea that operations are not feature‐driven in a highly constrained syntactic component, but interface‐driven, syntax being free and unbounded