pronoun trace

[Alice Faber]

Arnold Zwicky said:
>ron butters cited the following NP from a newspaper story:
> >a Fort Bragg soldier whose superiors refuse to let him resign [1]
>and asked:
> >Do YOU have an obligatory object deletion in this syntactic
> >environment?
>meaning that ron finds [1] ungrammatical and requires instead:
> >a Fort Bragg soldier whose superiors refuse to let resign [2].
>several others have agreed with these judgments, and now rudy
>troike has suggested an account of [1] in terms of parasitic gaps
>(i think he means resumptive pronouns) and long-distance effects.
>(the discussion of the case of subjects of non-finite clauses is
>entirely independent of the issue of [1] vs. [2].)
>
>i'm puzzled, but fascinated, by this discussion.  for me, [1] is
>straightforwardly grammatical, and [2] is just as straightforwardly
>ungrammatical.  for me, there is no way in which [1] is some sort of
>production error, or some sort of attempt to patch up a
>hard-to-interpret structure; long-distance effects, resumptive
>pronouns, and parasitic gaps are all irrelevant.  in fact, [1] (and
>not [2]) is exactly what you'd expect, given the general structure of
>WH relative clauses in english.

Thank you, Arnold! I've been equally puzzled by the discussion. Not only do
I find the original sentence perfectly good, I can't imagine any other way
to express it that doesn't involve heavy paraphrase.

Alice