LINGUIST List 2.311

Thursday, 20 June 1991

Qs: IO Agreement, CTP-Phenomena

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1. Hoskuldur Thrainsson, Re: Indirect Object Agreement
2. Jan Olsen, Query: CTP-Phenomena

Just a quick question to those of you who have been spreading this
interesting information on indirect object agreement: How do you
know an indirect object when you see one? Do you use semantic
criteria only (indirect object being some sort of benefactive,
recipient or whatever) or do you consider syntactic properties
like passivization possibilities, word order, case marking
or what? I'm just curious because it is not always clear to
me what people mean by "indirect object".
Hoeskuldur Thrainsson

In a number of (dialects of) languages, structures such as the following
are well-formed:
I wonder who that you will meet
Examples are Modern Hebrew (cf., e.g., papers by Shlonsky in LI & NLLT),
varieties of French (cf. e.g, fn. 8 in Pesetsky's 1981 TLR-paper on CTP-
effects), dialects of Dutch (cf., e.g. Koster's Foris book), and dialects
of German (cf., e.g.. my own _Konfigurationalitaet_). In one or the other
way, a number of theories of complementizer-trace phenomena predict that
these languages/dialects should allow the subject to be extracted from
complement clauses with an overt complementizer, and for the languages
just mentioned, this prediction appears to be borne out.
Andrew Radford (Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition...,, 1990, p.118) states
that
I wonder what kind of party that he has in mind
is "acceptable to a certain percentage of English speakers".
I'm wondering if these speakers would also find
who do you think that will win the next elections
grammatical (which is fine, e.g., for speakers of Texan English, cf. Sobin's
1987 NLLT paper).
Gisbert Fanselow (not Jan Olsen)
fanselowunipas.fmi.uni-passau.de