英文摘要 |
Parasitic gaps refer to a specific type of empty category, whose presence relies on that of another empty category. Mandarin Chinese is a pro-drop language, yet it is claimed that this language has parasitic gaps in the literature. I first argue that the empty object position in an adjunct clause cannot be labeled as a parasitic gap, since the existence of this empty category does not need to be accompanied by A’-movement; it can co-occur with A-movement or even appear in sentences with no overt movement at all. Therefore, the empty object position should be merely viewed as a trace left by null operator movement. Second, I extend the proposed analysis to the sentences which are said to have True Empty Positions (Li 2007), proposing that the grammatical contrast that leads Li to postulate True Empty Positions can be boiled down to whether the null operator movement involved in the formation of relevant sentences violates the Subjacency condition or not. This study, thus, provides a more economical way to deal with two seemingly unrelated but in fact highly similar constructions. |