Pied‐Piping: Comparing Two Recent Approaches

The term ‘pied‐piping’ is used by linguists to refer to structures where a movement operation applies to a constituent that is in some sense ‘larger than expected’. More precisely, pied‐piping occurs when a movement operation that usually targets expressions of a particular type ( e.g. wh‐words) instead targets a phrase that contains an expression of that type. Pied‐piping structures have long been a deep and difficult puzzle for formal syntactic theory. This is the second of two articles that present and compare two recent approaches to pied‐piping, those of Heck (2008, 2009) and Cable (2010a,b). These works offer two very different perspectives on the nature of pied‐piping, and thus yield rather different analyses of specific sub‐phenomena. Nevertheless, there is much overlap in their general predictions and in several core assumptions. In this article, I compare the empirical predictions of Heck’s and Cable’s accounts, noting especially those areas where both approaches are challenged. The phenomena we will examine include (i) the locality constraints on pied‐piping, (ii) Heck’s ‘Edge Generalization’, (iii) the apparent optionality of some pied‐piping structures, and (iv) so‐called ‘massive pied‐piping’.