pronoun trace

[Rudolph C Troike]

Re Ron Butters' quotation and question:


FORT BRAGG -- A national organization that fights for the rights of
homosexual service members has come to the defense of a Fort Bragg soldier
whose superiors refuse to let him resign. [Associated Press, Durham, NC,
HERALD, 2/16/02, B1]

Do YOU have an obligatory object deletion in this syntactic environment?

--The overt pronoun seems perfectly natural to me. Part of this may be due
to a "distance effect" that often kicks in when the antecedent is too far
away. This seems similar to, though not quite the same as, a "parasitic
gap" structure, in that I would never say:

        *The soldier's superiors refuse to let ___ resign.

As for the case, hoary traditional grammar had the dictum: "The subject of
the infinitive is in the objective case." Thanks to Beverly and Larry for
the further account of Chomsky's permutations and the Relative Clause
Hierarchy (Indonesian is one of those languages that can only relativize
on the Subject position). (It is interesting that at each turning in the
Chomskyan model, he has claimed that he was meeting explanatory adequacy,
whereas it turns out that he has barely been attaining descriptive
adequacy.)
        The structure "to let him resign" is what traditional grammarians
called an "unmarked" infinitive, since no "to" occurs here.

        Rudy