Extraction in Edo

Edo, a Niger-Congo language related to the Kwa languages of West Africa allows two distinct strategy of marking an ‘extraction site’, used in wh-constituent questions, under relativization, and for focus dislocation. These strategies are as follows:

• A pronominal item, normally the form of a 3rd person sg. pronoun, marks the ‘extraction-site’.
• A monosyllabic transitive verb (or preposition) subcategorizing for an extracted direct object, adopts the tonal (morphological) signature of an intransitive predicate.

TypeCraft contains data that shows the use of the pronominal site-holder in different extraction context, and more about the difference between extraction types and the function of the pronominal place holder can be found in the manuscript.

An further question addressed by the manuscript is the grammatical nature of the pronominal place holder. It occurs in the canonical position of an extracted argument, where it seems to function as a ‘spelled-out trace’, but plugs may also occur under extraction of non-arguments, such as inherent complements, corresponding to semantically but not syntactically incorporated nouns, and under adjunct-extraction.