English Object Extraposition and Constraint Satisfaction

Abstract

According to the Projection Principle (Chomsky 1981), expletives have no semantic content and thus cannot occur in theta-marked positions. However, there seem to exist overt cases where the expletive it appears in the theta-marked object position. Many attempts (Case-based analysis by Authier (1991), Predication analysis by Rothstein (1995), Spec analysis by Stroik (1991, 1996)) have been made to account for such cases, with the common postulation of generating the expletive in the non-theta marked position and moving to the object position. Though such movement operations could account for general cases, they have not been successful in capturing the contrast that happens with respect to various properties including the optionality of the expletive it. This paper claims that such a contrast, in addition to the distribution possibilities of it in the object position, easily follows from a lexical and constraint-based analysis couched upon tight interactions among various grammatical components such as lexicon, argument structure, syntax and semantics.