Universal licensing : implications for parasitic gap constructions

This dissertation investigates, within a Government-Binding framework, the licensing mechanisms which regulate the distribution of sentence-internal constituents. It is proposed that the licensing requirements apply across components, in the spirit of the Projection Principle of Chomsky (1981). Under the extended view of licensing proposed here ("Universal Licensing"), maximal projections must comply with the appropriate licensing requirements at every syntactic level of representation.This allows for a more constrained model of grammar, under which a number of facts follow in a principled way; this is the case particularly with respect to constructions involving null operators. Thus, from the D- and S-Structure conditions on null operator licensing, we derive the cross-linguistic as well as the language-internal distribution of resumptive pronouns. Furthermore, some of the well-known, but so far stipulated, constraints on parasitic gap (PG) constructions are shown to follow from general principles: we explain for instance the fact that PGs must be sanctioned at S-Structure, as well as the inability of adjunct movement to license PGs.The consequences of Universal Licensing on the distribution of PGs are examined with particular reference to adnominal PGs in French genitival relatives. It is shown that the properties displayed by these little-studied ("double dont") constructions, in conjunction with the Universal Licensing Principle, shed significant light on a number of issues, among which the thematic structure of nominals, and the nature of the locality constraints on null operator identification