Tokens vs. Copies: Displacement Revisited

In this paper we will analyze the conceptual and computational motivations of the property of displacement in natural languages from a revisited perspective. We will account for displacement phenomena proposing our own version of displacement‐as‐external token Merge , as opposed to the traditional displacement‐as‐literal movement or, more recently, displacement‐as‐copy and Merge (Chomsky [Chomsky, N., 1995]; Kitahara [Kitahara, H., 1997]; Nunes [Nunes, J., 2004]). As far as empirical data is concerned, we will provide a brief analysis of parasitic gaps and their derivation, comparing our proposal with previous accounts making particular stress on the idea that operations are not feature‐driven in a highly constrained syntactic component, but interface‐driven, syntax being free and unbounded.