Parasitic Gap in English and Korean: A CCG Analysis

Parasitic gap is interesting in that its existence depends on a real gap in the sentences. The goal of this paper is to provide an analysis on the parasitic gap constructions in English and Korean and to examine how head parameters may affect the analyses of parasitic gaps in these two languages. The theoretical framework that this paper takes is Steedman s Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG). In the CCG system, English parasitic gaps have been analyzed using backward cross functional substitution. In Korean, however, parasitic gaps usually precede the real gap. Therefore, they have to be analyzed using forward cross functional substitution. This paper shows how the parasitic gaps in English and Korean can be analyzed in the CCG system and how their semantic interpretations can be calculated based on the syntactic operations on the constituents. This paper also examines how head parameters may affect the CCG analyses of parasitic gap constructions.