On Category Restrictions in Across-the-Board and Parasitic Domains: Evidence from Russian∗

This paper is concerned with the nature of category restrictions in across-the-board and parasitic gaps. Postal (1993) observes that parasitic gaps in English exhibit category restrictions but across-the-board gaps do not show such restrictions. Munn (2001) indicates that independent differences in the across-the-board and parasitic domains can account for category restrictions in parasitic gaps: whereas parasitic gap domains constitute selective islands, across-the-board domains do not. Based on a new set of data from Russian contrastive coordination, the paper provides strong evidence in support of the argument that category restrictions should be attributed to the inherent properties of a certain domain, which in this case is the across-the-board domain of contrastive coordination. ∗I thank Alan Munn for helpful discussions of this work. I also thank Cristina Schmitt, Barbara Abbott, Yen-Hwei Lin, the audience of BIDE06, LSA Summer Meeting 2006 and the SLS conference 2006 for their insightful comments. For native-speaker judgements, many thanks go to Artem Prokhorov, Elena Selezneva, Olga Eremina, Dmitriy Bryndin and Olga Agafonova.