The Unity of Unbounded Dependency Constructions

Book excerpt: How do human languages transmit complex information about the properties of phrases over arbitrarily large structural distances? This fundamental and difficult question is raised by the phenomenon of extraction. Extraction has driven the devlopment of syntactic theory over the past three and a half decades. However, there has been no consensus on what form the connectivity mechanism should take. A number of recent, mutually incompatible theoretical approaches share the general view that extraction is not a unitary phenomenon. This monograph argues that when a broader range of data is considered, the supporting arguments of this view are radically undercut. Levine and Hukari conclude that the grammar of extraction connectivity is relatively simple, homogeneous with respect to construction type and uniform with respect to the position of the extractee. Book jacket.