Prosody and the That-Trace Effect: An Experimental Study

This phenomenon, studied since at least Perlmutter (1968), has been subject to two broad types of analysis (see Pesetsky (forthcoming)). In one, the effect derives from constraints on the whdependency related to the hierarchical structure of the sentence, while in the other, it derives from constraints on the linear order of elements. In the latter type of analysis, some have argued that the constraints take the form of a prosodic filter (Kandybowicz, 2006; Ha, 2010; Sato & Dobashi, 2013). Kandybowicz (2006), for instance, posits a prosodic filter that disallows adjacency between a complementizer and a gap (wh-trace) when they are within the same prosodic phrase and the complementizer is aligned with the left edge of that phrase. This accounts for (1), assuming that that is at the left edge of the prosodic phrase, and it also accounts for the amelioration that occurs when that and the gap are not adjacent, as in (2) (Bresnan, 1977; Barss and Deprez, 1986; Culicover, 1993), or when they are in separate prosodic phrases, as in (3) (De Chene, 1995, 2000, 2001).