Adjunct extraction

In current linguistic theory, the theoretical status of adjunct extractions, as in for example How often do you think Robin sees Kim? is, somewhat surprisingly, an unresolved issue, with some investigators arguing that only arguments extract syntactically, entailing analyses of adverbial gaps via fundamentally different mechanisms from those posited for argument extraction. We adduce extensive evidence against such positions from a number of languages which exhibit morphological or syntactic phenomena which are sensitive to binding (extraction) domains and where this morphosyntactic flagging is present in instances of adjunct extraction as well as argument extraction. We also present language-internal arguments for the syntactic nature of adjunct extraction in English, including the coextensiveness of adjunct and argument extraction and their parallelism with respect to strong/weak crossover effects. Finally, we discuss the challenge which binding domain effects pose for accounts of adjunct extraction in various frameworks.