Many variants of categorial grammar assume an underlying logic which is associative and linear. In relation to left extraction, the former property is challenged by island domains, which involve nonassociativity, and the latter property is challenged by parasitic gaps, which involve nonlinearity. We present a version of type logical grammar including ‘structural inhibition’ for nonassociativity and ‘structural facilitation’ for nonlinearity and we give an account of relativisation including islands and parasitic gaps and their interaction.

In Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture, the well-formed expressions of a language are licensed by correspondences between phonology, syntax, and conceptual structure. I show how this architecture can be used to make sense of the existence of parasitic gap constructions. A parasitic gap is one that is rendered acceptable because of the presence of another gap in the same sentence. Compare *a person whoi everyone who talks to ti likes Chris, which shows an illicit extraction from a relative clause, and a person (...) whoi everyone who talks to pgi likes ti, which shows a parasitic gap in the relative clause. Languages differ in terms of the range of configurations in which they allow parasitic gaps; these configurations appear to form a hierarchy. These observations raise some fundamental questions: Why do parasitic gaps exist at all? Why are different syntactic configurations possible for P-gaps and why just these configurations? Why is there a parasitic gap hierarchy? The answers that I propose make crucial use of constructional overgeneralization of across-the-board extraction in coordinate constructions, formulated straightforwardly in the framework of Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture. (shrink)