Band 35, Heft 2-3 - A constraint on copy deletion

One version of the copy theory of movement holds that syntactic traces are full-fledged constituents which undergo a PF-deletion rule. In this paper, I propose a constraint on this rule. The constraint says that the lower copy of a chain can be phonologically deleted only if it ends an XP. I show that this constraint, conjoined with proposals that have been made concerning phrase structure (Chomsky, Bare phrase structure, 1994) and the semantics of NP in classifier languages (Chierchia, Natural Language Semantics 6: 339–405, 1998), explains a variety of facts in Dutch, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, Swedish and Vietnamese.