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In the study of syntax, a parasitic gap is a construction in which one "gap" appears to be dependent on another "gap", that is, the one gap can appear only by virtue of the appearance of the other gap, hence the former is said to be "parasitic" on the latter, e.g. ''Which explanation did you reject __1 without first really considering __2?'' While parasitic gaps are present in English and some related Germanic languages, e.g. Swedish, their appearance is much more restricted in other, closely related languages, e.g. German and the Romance languages.〔Parasitic gaps have been studied most using English and Swedish data. See Engdahl's seminal article (1983) in this regard.〕 An aspect of parasitic gaps that makes them particularly mysterious is the fact they usually appear inside islands to extraction. Although the study of parasitic gaps began in the late 1970s, no consensus has yet been reached about the best analysis.〔See the introduction in Culicover's and Postal's collection of papers (2001) for an overview of the varying theoretical accounts of parasitic gaps.〕 ==The phenomenon== The following b-sentences illustrate typical parasitic gaps. The parasitic gaps are marked with a p-subscript: ::a. You reviewed that book without actually reading it. - No gap at all present ::b. What book did you review __ without actually reading __p? - Parasitic gap possible ::c. *You reviewed that book without actually reading __p. - Parasitic gap impossible without "real" gap ::a. They played that song repeatedly despite not liking it. - No gap at all present ::b. Which song did they play __ repeatedly despite not liking __p? - Parasitic gap possible ::c. *They played that song repeatedly despite not liking __p. - Parasitic gap impossible without "real" gap ::a. You bought that old bike in order to fix it up. - No gap at all present ::b. Which old bike did you buy __ in order to fix __p up? - Parasitic gap possible ::c. *You bought that old bike in order to fix __p up. - Parasitic gap impossible without "real" gap The a-sentences are normal declarative sentences that contain no gaps at all. Each b-sentence, in contrast, contains two gaps, whereby the second gap is parasitic on the first. The c-sentences illustrate that if there is no "real" gap (that corresponds to the wh-expression in bold), the parasitic gap is not possible. One interesting thing about parasitic gaps like the ones here in the b-sentences is their motivation. Their appearance appears to be reliant on syntactic movement (e.g. wh-movement or topicalization). The fact, however, that there are two gaps in each b-sentence but only one fronted wh-expression is a source of the difficulty associated with the construction. How does it come to pass that one fronted wh-expression is capable of licensing two gaps? Another interesting fact about parasitic gaps is that they usually appear inside extraction islands (as they do in the examples just given), hence one might expect extraction from the site of parasitic gaps to be altogether impossible. The fact that the islands are ignored is a second source of challenge associated with the phenomenon. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「parasitic gap」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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