{{no footnotes, date=November 2011
The Trace Erasure Principle is a stipulation proposed by
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is ...
noun phrase
In linguistics, a noun phrase, or nominal (phrase), is a phrase that has a noun or pronoun as its head or performs the same grammatical function as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently oc ...
(NP) can be replaced only by a designated morpheme and not by an arbitrary NP.
The following is an example of this Principle:
:''A person is here, waiting for you.''
can be transformed into:
:''There is a person here, waiting for you.''
and this Principle remains fulfilled.
Both sentences hold the same meaning, because we have designated ''There'' to replace ''a person'' —both terms are mutually linked—, and the meaning remains.
A case where this principle is not fulfilled can be the following:
:''Maria loves Mario.''
transformed into:
:''Mario loves Maria.''
Obviously, the meaning of the latter is radically different from that of the first. We have replaced ''Mario'' with ''Maria'', and their meaning is not linked. We have arbitrarily chosen ''Mario'' to replace ''Maria''.
But the following phrase fulfills the Principle:
:''Maria, who loves Mario.''
In this case, ''who'' identifies with ''Maria''.
References
* Faarlund, Jan Terje (1990) ''Syntactic change: toward a theory of historical syntax'', Walter de Gruyter, pages 179-18 Grammar