[Warning: this is long and pretty technical — but, I think, necessarily so.]
From Ben Zimmer on July 5, this wonderful relative clause example (with the crucial part boldfaced), from a NYT story about Gov. Rick Perry of Texas:
(1) Mr. Perry, whose aides say will make a decision within weeks, has been meeting around the country with potential fund-raisers… (link)
In terms that have become customary in talking about relative clauses (and other “extraction” constructions): the relative clause in (1) has a gap in its VP, a subject gap in the clause that is complement to say:
say [ ___ will make a decision within weeks ]
The gap is filled by the relative pronoun who in whose.
Framing this in somewhat more neutral terms (without reference to gaps, fillers, or extraction): who in whose serves as the subject of the VP will make a decision within weeks.
But at the same time, whose aides serves as the subject of the VP say will make a decision within weeks. So there are two syntactic-relation linkages here: the whole NP whose aides to the larger VP, and the relative pronoun who (within whose aides) to the smaller VP.
Ben judged (1) to be somewhat odd, despite its source, and I agreed with him, but he quickly came up with other parallel examples from equally respectable sources, so we concluded that the pattern of linkages in (1) is not to be labeled as generally ungrammatical in English (though there are speakers who prefer alternatives to it). It’s not clear how to analyze such double-linkage examples, but (as Geoff Pullum noted in correspondence with us) movement analyses, in which constituents are literally extracted from other constituents and moved to the front of the clause, would seem to offer no plausible source for them.
(more…)
