Parasitic gap

In grammar, a parasitic gap is a construction wherein the dropping of a verb's argument is dependent on a co-referential argument having been fronted in a preceding context. An English example is:: "Which book did she review __ without reading __?"The key feature here is that both "review" and "reading" have a "gap" where their objects should be (indicated above with underscores), and both gaps appear to function as variables bound by "which book"; i.e. "Which book x did she review x without reading x?". The second gap is considered to be "parasitic" on the first, since it (unlike the first gap) cannot easily stand on its own, shown by the following example.: "*She reviewed "War and Peace" without reading __."This has the same structure as the first sentence but with a non-WH matrix object, which doesn't front.The properties of the construction are quite subtle. For example (assuming passives involve fronting):: "*The book was reviewed __ without reading __."which is generally considered ungrammatical by most native English speakers.

Parasitic gaps are an important topic of study in syntax, especially in the framework of generative grammar. It has been argued by some linguists working in generative frameworks that speakers' intuitive knowledge of the construction can only be explained by an innate universal grammar. The question of how these sentences should be analysed is still very much open.

The phenomenon appears to have been discovered by John Robert Ross in the 1960s, [cite book | title=Constraints on Variables in Syntax | author=Ross, John Robert | publisher=MIT PhD dissertation | year=1967] but remained undiscussed until papers by Knut Tarald Taraldsen and Elisabet Engdahl explored the properties of parasitic gaps in great depth. This work was extended by Noam Chomsky in 1982, [cite book | author= Chomsky, Noam |title=Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph Six|year=1982|publisher=MIT Press] arguing that parasitic gaps are actually silent pronouns, licensed under particular conditions predicted by the general theory of grammar. Aspects of this analysis were developed in the framework of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG) in the mid 1980s, and refined in the Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), done by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag. More recent research by Chomsky and his student Jonathan Nissenbaum [cite book | author=Jonathan Nissenbaum | title=Investigations of Covert Phrase Movement | year=2000 | publisher=MIT PhD dissertation] has refined this view, arguing (in effect) that the pronouns themselves undergo a syntactic rule not unlike the rule that moves phrases like "which book" to the front of a sentence.

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