Filler-gap mismatches

[Mike Maxwell]

Robert Levine wrote:

>Similar examples show up with passives as well:
>
>That real-time parsing is so fast cannot be accounted for
>by any of our current theories of sentence processing.
>
>*None of our current theories of sentence processing can
>account for that real-tim parsing is so fast.

But surely passive is a different case (no pun intended) from topicalization
and coordination constructions, isn't it?  I.e. Robert's examples are
related to the fact (well, theory) that sentential subjects are not really
in the subject position.  (There's a long precedent for this in East Coast
theories, dating back to at least Koster 1978, and resurrected in West Coast
theories (albeit in Europe!) by Berman 1996.)

OTOH, maybe that's Robert's point--that these so-called sentential subject
constructions are really "binding" of an NP position by an S?  And this same
S-binding-NP position could account for the topicalization constructions (if
not the coordination ones).

----------

Koster, Jan. 1978. "Why Subject Sentences don't exist." In _Recent
Transformational Studies in European Languages_, pg. 53-64.  Ed. by S. Jay
Keyser.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Berman, Judith. 1996. "Topicalization vs. Left Dislocation of Sentential
Arguments in German."  In _Proc. of the LFG96 Conference_, ed. by Miriam
Butt and Tracy Holloway King.  Grenoble.

                                         Mike Maxwell
                                         Summer Institute of Linguistics
                                         Mike_Maxwell at sil.org