Snippets - Issue 8 February 2004 http://www.ledonline/snippets/ - 10 - 3. Stefan Müller - University of Bremen Complex NPs, subjacency, and extraposition Stefan.Mueller@cl.uni-bremen.de Chomsky (1986, p. 40) argues that t in (1) cannot be the source of the extraposition and explains this by the principle of subjacency which says that only one barrier may be crossed by extraposition. See also Baltin 1981 on extraposition and sub- jacency. (1) a. [ NP Many books [ PP with [stories t]] t ] were sold [that I wanted to read]. b. [ NP Many proofs [ PP of [the theorem t]] t ] appeared [that I wanted to think about]. Grewendorf (1988,p. 281), Haider (1996, p.261) and Rohrer (1996, p.103) assumed that subjacency also plays a role for extraposition in German, but if one substitutes the head noun in (1) in a way that reduces attachment ambiguities these examples can be translated to German without resulting in unacceptable sentences: (2) weil viele Schallplatten mit Geschichten verkauft wurden, die ich noch lesen wollte. because many records with stories sold were that I yet read wanted because many records with stories that I wanted to read were sold. A plausible context for (2) would be a situation where the speaker goes to a record shop and certain records remind him that he wanted to buy the respective books to read the stories. In general, there seems to be no upper limit for the number of phrase nodes that may be crossed by dislocation to the right: (3) Karl hat mir [eine Kopie [einer Flschung [des Bildes [einer Frau t i ]]]] gegeben, [die schon lange tot ist] i . Karl gave me a copy of a forgery of the picture of a woman who has been dead for a long time. As (3) shows, relative clauses can be extraposed from an arbitrarily deeply embed- ded NP. Note that the examples are constructed in a way that excludes all other at- tachments. For semantic reasons the relative clause can only refer to Frau (woman). Similarly, complement clauses can be extraposed from an arbitrarily deeply embedded NP: (4) Ich habe [von [dem Versuch [eines Beweises [der Vermutung t i ]]]] gehrt, [da es Zahlen gibt, die die folgenden Bedingungen erfüllen] i . I have of the attempt of a proof of the assumption heard that it numbers gives that the following conditions satisfy I have heard of the attempt to prove the assumption that there are numbers for which the following conditions hold.