• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.58-64
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• 2018

The Extraposition phenomenon in English has been analyzed mainly through two approaches: a derivational approach under the Principles & Parameters framework (P&P) and a representational approach under the early Minimalist framework (MP). The first one tries to understand the phenomenon as a result of the movement of a Big Subject first to the end of a sentence which is then followed by the insertion of an expletive 'it' to the empty Subject position. On the other hand, the second one tries to understand it by way of assuming a Big Subject originally base-generated at the end of a sentence which is followed by the insertion of an expletive 'it' to the empty Subject position. The two approaches, however, are not free from theoretical defects at all: the full derivational approach was under controversy in terms of (1) the failure of the Binding Theory and (2) its inability to suggest anything about the marginal reading issue. On the while, the representational approach has been argued (1) to violate the thematic hierarchy that should be kept in D-structure, and (2) to be also unable to suggest the slightest difference in marginal reading issue as the first one. In this paper I focus mainly on analyzing the 'It'-Extraposition phenomenon in the Optimality Theory. I will show that by way of (i) some newly developed constraints such as Subj., and AHSubj. and (ii) a constraint hierarchy of Subj.>>AHSubj., the controversies of 'It-Extraposition' such as (1) the analysis of construction and (2) the very closely related issue of 'marginal reading issue' can be explained properly.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.168-178
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• 2019

In this paper I discuss a more complicated case of 'It'-Extraposition in English in the Optimality Theory [1] by further modifying and extending the analysis done in Khym (2018) [2] in which only the 'relatively' simple cases of 'It'-Extraposition such as 'CP-Predicate' was dealt with. I show in this paper that the constraints and the constraint hierarchy developed to explain the 'relatively' simple cases of 'It'-Extraposition are no longer valid for the more complicated cases of 'It'-Extraposition in configuration of 'CP-V-CP'. In doing so, I also discuss two important theoretic possibilities and suggest a new view to look at the 'It'-Extraposition: first, the long-bothering question of which syntactic approach between P&P (Chomsky 1985) [3] and MP (Chomsky 1992) [4] should be based on in projecting the full surface forms of candidates may boil down to just a simple issue of an intrinsic property of the Gen(erator). Second, the so-called 'It'- Extraposition phenomenon may not actually be a derived construction by the optional application of Extraposition operation. Rather, it could be just a representational construction produced by the simple application of 'It'-insertion after the structure projection with 'that-clause' at the post-verbal position. This observation may lead to elimination of one of the promising candidates of '$It_i{\ldots}[_{CP}that{\sim}]_i$' out of the computation table in Khym [2], and eventually to excluding the long-named 'It'-Extraposition case from Extrsposition phenomena itself. The final constraints and the constraint hierarchy that are explored are as follows: ${\bullet}$ Constraints: $^*SSF$, AHSubj, Subj., Min-D ${\bullet}$ Constraint Hierarchy: SSF<<>>Subj.>> AHSubj.