What is it about?

Some syntactic phenomena, like for example "VP-fronting" in English ("She said he'd go home, and go home she did") are described as typically being restricted to unembedded/root/main clauses ("She said she'd go home. *If go home she did, you'll be able to call her there"). But it's long been observed that these phenomena *can* occur in a subset of subordinate clauses (e.g. "They wanted her to go home. So she said that go home, she would.") The article reviews some of these phenomena and what has been said about them in recent years.

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Why is it important?

The possibility of embedding complex syntactic structures like clauses is an important part of our linguistic competence. The work described here is part of an attempt to understand some of the detail of how this embedding plays out. The chapter is a completely rewritten update on the chapter of the same title in the first edition of this set of volumes, and includes references to work that has come out since the first edition was published.

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This page is a summary of: Embedded Root Phenomena, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/9780470996591.ch23.
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