Filler-gap mismatches

[Carl Pollard]

Hi Ivan,




>
But I'm still unclear about what really ameliorates cases like (7):

 ?*Sandy could think of, under most circumstances, that he might be wrong,
   and not of what the actual consequences might be if he were right.

 ?*Sandy thought about, when she was in Rome, that she might have
   made a mistake.

Of course these adverbs don't really like to separate a preposition from
its NP object either:

 ?(?)Sandy could think of, under most circumstances, only
     the consequences of their decision
>>


Right, these are pretty wretched. it is like trying to separate a verb
from its direct object. But these additional facts are still
consistent with the empirical generalization I mentioned before:

> As I recall, the folkloric
> conclusion was that an English prepositional object cannot have
> complementizer THAT as its first word

In my examples with ONLY instead of an adverb, what is different
from your exx. above is that ONLY forms a constituent with what follows,
so the preposition is not separated from its object. But it is
enough to keep the prepositional object from starting with THAT.

Carl