English Filler Gap Constructions

In the tradition of transformational grammar, the term ‘(grammatical) construction’ has been a theoretical taboo at least since the 1980s. It was then that Chomsky argued that transformations like ‘passive’ and ‘raising’, common in earlier versions of transformational grammar, should be eliminated in favor of general conditions on structures that would allow a single operation – ‘Move NP’ – to do the work of a family of such transformations. This guided the subsequent evolution of transformational theory, where one finds discussion of even more general operations, such as ‘Move α’ or simply ‘Move’. This evolution from constructionspecific rules to proposals focused on general principles from which the idiosyncrasy of individual constructions are supposed to be derived is universally heralded by practitioners of GB or ‘Minimalism’ as a significant positive step in the evolution of linguistic science. However, as noted already by McCawley (1988a), the centerpiece of Chomsky’s (1986) argument – his discussion of the passive construction – did not touch on crucial issues such as the participial verb morphology, the choice of the preposition by, and the role of the verb be. McCawley pointed out that these properties of the construction followed from nothing under the more ‘explanatory’ proposals made by Chomsky, whose analysis of passivization, when complete, was comparably stipulative to the ‘construction-based’ transformational alternative it sought to replace. Yet Chomsky (1993: 4) writes as follows, fomenting an anticonstructionist bias throughout the generative world that remains alive and well even today: