Adjunct Extraposition: Base Generation or Movement?
Matthew Reeve, Glyn Hicks · Syntax · 2017
Abstract It has been argued that extraposition fromDPis derived differently according to whether a complement or an adjunct is extraposed, with complement extraposition being derived by movement and adjunct extraposition being derived via covert Quantifier Raising (QR) of the hostDPplus Late Merge of the adjunct (Fox & Nissenbaum 1999). We argue that adjunct extraposition is itself derivationally ambiguous and may be derived either by movement of the adjunct or by base generation of the adjunct in extraposed position. Accordingly, we argue for a relaxation of the strictly compositional view that nominal modification is always mediated by syntactic sisterhood. We argue that whereas base‐generated extraposition is possible with quantificational hostDPs, adjunct extraposition from definites must be derived by movement. This accounts for a number of asymmetries between extraposition from definites and from other types ofDP, concerning reconstruction for condition C, scope reconstruction, and information‐structural restrictions on extraposition.