2013 Volume 30 Issue 2 Pages 540-567
The purpose of this paper is to make a proposal for Antecedent-Contained Deletion under the copy theory of movement (cf. Chomsky (1995)). Although the puzzles this construction poses have been discussed in Fox (2002) and Chomsky (2004), problems still remain to be solved. The proposal is to base-generate the head of the relative clause within the antecedent VP, while base-generating the relative clause containing the deletion site in an adjoined position of the antecedent VP. This paper pays special attention to the tricky construction in which the relative clause containing the ACD site is contained within the antecedent VP at surface structure, and explains this construction under McCawley’s (1982) theory of discontinuous constituent structure.
