Filler-gap mismatches

[Ivan A. Sag]

Hi Carl et al,

> > 7) ?Sandy could think of only that he might be wrong, and not of
> >    what the actual consequences might be if he were right.
>
> We discussed these examples back in the early 80's in connection
> with some HP Labs implementation. As I recall, the folkloric
> conclusion was that an English prepositional object cannot have
> complementizer THAT as its first word [but WHETHER is okay, as in
>
> 8) The whole question of whether Dana is a gunrunner never came up.]

I think the whether cases follow from more general considerations about
embedded interrogatives, which have the external distribution of NPs
in most (but not all) occurrences (see Ginzburg and Sag 2000, chapter 8).

Cf. the question of why/when/where/how they did it...

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

-Ivan