Syntacticizing blends

Abstract

This paper aims at analysing English structures in which a wh-moved subject triggers agreement both in the clause it is extracted from and in the immediately higher clause. This pattern is only accepted by some native speakers, and it is also attested in corpora. Although the relevant structures could at first sight be analysed as extragrammatical ‘blends’, we propose that they are in fact part of certain speakers’ linguistic competence, and hence generated by the grammar of those speakers. Adopting the approach to subject extraction developed in Rizzi & Shlonsky (2007) , we suggest that extracted subjects can exceptionally be ‘hyperactive’ ( Carstens 2011 ), and thus take part in A-relations (case and agreement) in more than one clausal domain.

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