Syntax II						Spring 2018
Assignment 10						Due Friday May 4


I.  Now For Something A Little Bit Hard

The following examples (and others like them) illustrate something new about
the constructions we have investigated in the past few weeks.

  (1) *Which book did Sue meet the man who Bill said wrote?

  (2) *Whose theory about islands could Jim have been wondering which class
	he should introduce in?

  (3) *The can that the pearls that the woman put in were stolen has
	disappeared.

  (4) *What kind of listening device did the police arrest the man who
	installed in the men's restroom?

  (5) *We fired the employee who nobody could figure out how much money
	had stolen.

First, show that these sentences are generated by your grammar; or if you
think they are not, show exactly why not.

If they are, what generalization can you state about what is going wrong?



II. A Possible Explanation

It has been proposed that in WH movement, the XP[+WH] moves not directly to
the specifier of a C[0WH], but stepwise through the specifier position of every
CP between its origin and its final landing site.  Thus in (6), the phrase
'to whom' would start in the position marked by 't', and pass through the specifier
positions marked by 'x' on its way to its surface position:

(6)  To whom did Albert say x that Sally thought x that Louise believed x that Anne was referring t?

Under this proposal, WH movement would not be unbounded, but rather would proceed in a series
of steps.  This is called the "successive cyclic" theory of WH movement.

How much of what you observed in Part I would be accounted for if we assume
that WH movement is successive cyclic?