Types of A'-Dependencies (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs)

Types of A'-Dependencies develops the theories of Binding and Government of the "principles and parameters" approach to syntax pioneered by Noam Chomsky. Using data from Romance languages, Cinque argues for a particular way of delimiting the descriptive generalizations that concern the grammar of constituent extraction, and the principles from which they derive. Cinque starts by distinguishing four major cases of A'-Dependencies on the basis of their different behavior with respect to island conditions. He discusses the distinction between "long" and "successive cyclic" wh-movement, indicating restrictions on the class of elements able to undergo "long" wh-movement and offering a simplification of the locality conditions on the two types of movement. Cinque then introduces a Romance construction, Clitic Left Dislocation, to show the value of separating the two types of wh-movement and offers a theory that explains certain differences between NPs and non-NPs under extraction. Guglielmo Cinque is a Professor on the Faculty of Linguistics at the University of Venice.