COPY RAISING IN ENGLISH AND THE NULL OPERATOR ABANDONMENT HYPOTHESIS FOR PRONOMINAL BINDING

Abstract

This paper argues that copy raising in English, whose derivation has been explained by means of a syntactic operator in the literature, in fact does not involve any operator in its derivation, and the crucial requirement that the embedded clause have a pronoun coreferential with the matrix subject is due to a semantic-pragmatic factor related to the semantics of comparison. The motivation behind this is the Null Operator Abandonment Hypothesis for Pronominal Binding that I propose in this paper, according to which languages in which resumption is nongrammatical disallow the (null) operator-pronoun configuration. An important consequence is that pronominal variables in English can be licensed only via A-binding, which leaves us with no choice but to abandon A′-dependencies in the derivation of copy raising.