A number of phenomena in different languages seem to be constrained by a ban on multiple objects of the same type that are too close together. In this paper I will attempt to develop a general theory of bans of this type, which will involve (among other things) the relevant formal definitions of “same type ” and “too close together”. The result will be a theory of syntactic phenomena not unlike those handled by the OCP in phonology 1. We will see that some of the facts that have traditionally been handled by Case theory can be made to follow from more general conditions on syntax. English quotative inversion offers a relevant example. In quotative inversion, a quote appears at the beginning of the sentence, and the subject is postverbal: (1) “It’s cold, ” said John. In such examples, the verb may be followed by material other than the subject: (2) “It’s cold, ” said John to Mary. However, the postverbal material may not consist of multiple DPs: (3) *“It’s cold, ” told John Mary. Quotative inversion, then, is constrained by a ban on multiple DPs in the postverbal domain. To handle these facts, and others like them, I will propose a new well-formedness condition on the linearization statements used by Kayne's (1994) LCA. The new restriction on ordering statements will have the effect of making multiple syntactic nodes of the same kind
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