pronoun trace

[Dennis R. Preston]

>Ditto Alice.

dInIs


>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