The Parasitic gap reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Parasitic gap

A parasitic gap is a grammatical construction. An English example is:

Which book did you review without reading?

The key feature here is that "reading" apparently has no object (reading what?) but its object is assumed to be the book in question. The properties of the construction are quite subtle, for example

The book was reviewed without reading

is generally considered ungrammatical by most native English speakers.

Parasitic gaps are an important topic of study in syntax, especially in the framework of Transformational grammar. It has been argued by some linguists working in this framework that speakers' intuitive knowledge of the construction can only be explained by an innate universal grammar. This is highly controversial, however.

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