Across-the-Board Phenomena

Mark de Vries

Mark de Vries

University of Groningen, the Netherlands

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First published: 24 November 2017
Citations: 17

Abstract

Across-the-Board (ATB) phenomena in linguistics, can generally be defined as one-to-many correspondences. Standard examples involve wh-extraction out of two or more coordinated clauses or phrases at once, as in Which teacher did John like _ and Sue hate _?Such configurations violate an otherwise valid bi-uniqueness principle: an antecedent licenses one and only one dependent element; furthermore, they are at variance with the alleged island status of coordinate structures. As such, ATB phenomena constitute an intriguing syntactic puzzle. There are diverse views on the nature and explanation of ATB, as well as on the question of which construction types can be subsumed under it. Coordination is clearly an important factor, since ATB does not normally involve hierarchically different positions, with the possible exception of parasitic gaps and a few other construction types. It has also been claimed that ATB phenomena extend to certain cases of ellipsis, including Right Node Raising. Apart from this, it is evident that various types of features, including case, can be spread over multiple conjuncts, and that binding by some antecedent outscoping the entire coordination phrase may concern pronominal variables in more than one conjunct at once. This raises the question of whether some kind of multidimensional representation is required for coordinate structures. Related topics to be discussed from the current perspective are forward versus backward multiple dependencies, and split antecedents.

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