Festschrifts

This article addresses the longstanding debate on the unification of parasitic gaps (PGs) and across-the-board (ATB) constructions, discussing novel data from Italian. We show that PP PGs are indeed possible in the language (contra Cinque 1990), which undermines a previous argument against unification. We further show that apparent mismatches in the prepositional content of the main clause extractee and the “parasitic” extractee are allowed with certain reciprocal verbs like litigare ‘argue’, which feature an underlying unaccusative structure (van Craenenbroeck & Johnson 2023b) and prepositions that can “disappear” in specific alternations. We argue that PG constructions are derived through smuggling (Hicks 2009) of the parasitic extractee, which is underspecified for case, to the edge of the adjunct clause, from where it can then undergo ATB movement under identity with the main clause extractee. In using this analysis to explain the range of possible mismatches between PGs and their antecedents, we further strengthen the case for reducing PGs to ATB.