Fillers in Syntax
The linguistic term "filler" has another, unrelated use in syntactic terminology. It refers to the pre-posed element that fills in the "gap" in a wh-movement construction. In the following example, there is an object gap associated with the transitive verb saw, and the filler is the wh-phrase how many angels:
- I don't care she told you she saw.
Wh-movement is said to create a long-distance or unbounded "filler-gap dependency".
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