Re: Soaloa evolves, and a small challenge

David J. Peterson palsalge

>A better example (now that I've opened up my notes from
>my pragmatics class) that shows the first and last of three
>verbs which take the topic as the object, and an intransitive
>second verb, is as follows:
>
>"What cake did John buy, come home and devour?"
>
>With gaps...
>
>"What cake(i) did John(ii) buy _(i), _(ii) come home and _(ii) devour
>_(i)?"
>
>Now here's something interesting.  If you take away the
>middle verb, you still get a grammatical question:
>
>"What cake did John buy and devour?"
>
>But if you take away the last one...
>
>*"What cake did John buy and come home?"
An interesting set of data. Hm...since "come" is unergative, it has no
object. As was later pointed out, some find the following grammatical (note
that the second verb is unaccusative):
1) Venice is the city that I want to visit and die.

If they also find your last example ungrammatical, then they only find
these constructions grammatical when there is a moved element inside VP.
Call it the Serial Clefting Condition:
2) Serial Clefting Condition: when a clefting construction involves more
than one subordinate CP, the first and final CPs must each have an operator
in a specifier position.

This says nothing deep or revealing about the nature of clefts, however, or
of conjunction. I'd prefer any analysis that did.