Carlos Muñoz Perez (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)

The structure of gaps: on the interaction of derivational order, economy and other sensible principles

Within current minimalism, reconstruction is taken to be a natural consequence of how structure-building operations work. In most implementations, this follows from two interconnected assumptions: (i) that the constituent functioning as the gap of a movement dependency is generated before than its filler (due to bottom-up nature of syntactic derivations), and (ii) that the filler is a copy of the gap (i.e., the copy theory of movement).
A priori, anti-reconstruction phenomena offer evidence against this general approach. While operations like Wholesale Late Merger (Takahashi & Hulsey 2009) allow this framework to account for a variety of anti-reconstruction effects, I argue that the reconstruction constraint known as Barss’ Generalization cannot be accounted for under the assumptions in (i) and (ii). In contrast, I maintain that Barss’ Generalization follows straightforwardly in a system in which (i’) fillers are generated before than gaps, and (ii’) gaps are computed from the structure of their fillers.
As for the mechanism in charge of (ii’), I propose that the content of movement gaps is calculated through the interaction of three principles: recoverability of deletion, representational economy, and interpretability. The proposal not only derives Barss’ Generalization, but also accounts for the distribution of anti-reconstruction effects in a number of contexts.