The End of CED? Minimalism and Extraction Domains

Abstract

Abstract. The traditional ‘‘unified’’ approaches to extractability out of subjects and adjuncts in the form of Huang's (1982) Condition on Extraction Domains (CED) and Chomsky's (1986a) Barriers and its minimalist descendants face an empirical challenge presented by languages in which extraction out of subjects is possible but extraction out of adjuncts is not. The existence of such languages calls into question the unifying basis for the traditional accounts—namely, the complement/noncomplement distinction that was at the core of these accounts. In this paper I consider a possible extension of a recent minimalist account making use of the complement/noncomplement distinction— Nunes and Uriagereka (2000) —to the problematic languages and show that it also encounters conceptual and empirical problems. I then propose an ‘‘eclectic’’ minimalist approach to extraction domains in which extractability out of subjects and adjuncts are regulated by different mechanisms of grammar in a nonoverlapping manner.