Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

English shows a number of peculiar alternatives next to standard long-distance (LD) subject extraction: subject LD questions where the wh-phrase bares objective case (1), subject LD questions with that (2) and cases of apparent wh-copying (3) (all examples from the COCA, Davies 2008 -)

(1)    Now, one last question. Whom do you think is going to win?      

(2)    Bottom line, what is the issue you think that will win it for you?

(3)    Could you just talk to us about who you think who is to blame, sir?

I argue that these constructions are all closely related to the kind of medial wh-movement constructions that can be found in German and Dutch (i.e. partial wh-movement, wh-copying), and that they do not involve LD-movement proper, but rather a type of secondary predication, in which the highest wh-phrase and the embedded clause together form a kind of subject pseudo-relative. I will argue that subject extraction from that-less clauses can be analyzed analogously. In effect, this means that there is no LD subject extraction in English at all and that the constructions under consideration can all be analyzed as yet another ‘fixed subject’ strategy (Rizzi & Shlonsky, 2007).

Davies, Mark. (2008) The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990-present. Retrieved from http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.

Rizzi, L., & Shlonsky, U. (2007). Strategies of subject extraction. In Sauerland, U. & Gärtner, (Eds.), Interfaces+ recursion= language? (pp. 115-160). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.