ANTECEDENT-CONTAINED DELETION AND FOCUS

Abstract

This paper discusses the antecedent-contained deletion (ACD) construction and examines under what conditions the acceptability of the construction is decided. First, the paper critically examines previous syntactic analyses such as May (1985), Hornstein (1994, 1995) and Diesing (1992). Then, it alternatively argues that the acceptability of the ACD construction is primarily controlled by the functional notion of focus. It subsequently shows that the present functional analysis can deal with the fact that there is pure asymmetry concerning the distribution of determiners between the ACD construction on the one hand and wh-extraction from NP and extraposition from NP on the other.