Parasitic gap
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A parasitic gap is a grammatical construction. An English example is:
- Which book did she review __ without reading __?
The key feature here is that both review and reading have a "gap" where their object should be (indicated here by the underscore), and both gaps appear to function as variables bound by which book — i.e. "For which book x, she reviewed x without reading x". The second gap is considered to be "parasitic" on the first, since it (unlike the first gap) cannot easily stand on its own. Thus the following example (with the position of the first gap "filled in") is less acceptable:
- Which book did she review War and Peace without reading __?
The properties of the construction are quite subtle. For example:
- The book was reviewed __ without reading __ (by John)
— with two gaps connected to the subject the book rather than an interrogative phrase like which book — is generally considered ungrammatical by most native English speakers.
Parasitic gaps are an important topic of study in syntax, especially in the framework of Transformational grammar. It has been argued (controversially) by some linguists working in this framework that speakers' intuitive knowledge of the construction can only be explained by an innate universal grammar. The question of how these sentences should be analysed is still very much open.
The phenomon appears to have been discovered by John Robert Ross in his 1967 dissertation, but remained undiscussed until papers by Knut Tarald Taraldsen and Elisabet Engdahl explored the properties of parasitic gaps in great depth. This work was extended by Noam Chomsky in his 1982 book Some Concepts and Consequence of the Theory of Government and Binding, which argued that parasitic gaps are actually silent pronouns, licensed under particular conditions, predicted by the general theory of grammar. Aspects of this analysis were developed in the framework of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG) in the mid 1980s. More recent research by Chomsky and his student Jonathan Nissenbaum has refined this view, arguing (in effect) that the pronouns themselves undergo a syntactic rule not unlike the rule that moves phrases like which book to the front of a sentence.