Across-the-Board Extraction in Minimalist Grammars

Minimalist grammars cannot provide adequate descriptions of constructions in which a single filler saturates two mutually independent gaps, as is commonly analyzed to be the case in parasitic gap constructions and other across-the-board extraction phenomena. In this paper, I show how a simple addition to the minimalist grammar formalism allows for a unified treatment of control and parasitic gap phenomena , and can be restricted in such a way as to account for across-the-board exceptions to the coordinate structure constraint. In the context of standard constraints on movement, the weak generative capacity of the formalism remains unaffected .