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From usage to grammar: The mind's response to repetition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Mark Baltin
Mark Baltin*
Affiliation:
New York University
*
Department of Linguistics, New York University, 719 Broadway #424, New York, NY 10003, [mark.baltin@nyu.edu]
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Abstract

This article shows that a VP in English is only a VP at the outset of a derivation, and that VP-preposing in English is in fact preposing of the internal arguments of the verb, followed by remnant movement of the original VP, making English and German (Müller 1998) more similar than they might appear at first glance. The evidence for the nonconstituency of the verb and its original arguments in preposed position comes from its solution to what has been termed Pesetsky's paradox, in that an object of a preposed VP can bind into an adverbial at the end of a sentence, creating an apparent conflict between the assumptions that binding requires c-command and that only constituents move. This article also provides evidence for c-command as the prominence constraint on binding, rather than o-command (Pollard & Sag 1994) or f-command (Dalrymple 1999).

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 82 , Issue 4 , December 2006, pp. 734 - 766
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 Linguistic Society of America

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