Parasitic gap

Do you know how sometimes people say things like "I gave my brother who lives in New York a present"? It seems like something is missing, right? We don't know what kind of present it was. Well, sometimes in sentences like this, there is something left out that we can't see or hear, but we know it's there because of the way the sentence is structured. We call this hidden thing a "parasitic gap."

It's like when you have a scavenger hunt and you get clues that lead you to the next clue. The first clue might say, "Look near the thing you use to brush your teeth." You might not know exactly what the thing is, but if you follow the clue, you'll eventually find the thing and then find the next clue.

In sentences with a parasitic gap, there is a word or phrase that is missing, but it's somewhere else in the sentence. The sentence is structured in a way that helps us figure out what's missing. In the sentence "I gave my brother who lives in New York a present," we know that the missing word is the kind of present that was given, even though we can't see or hear it. We know this because of the order of the words in the sentence and the way the sentence is put together.

So, a parasitic gap is like a hidden thing in a sentence that we can't see or hear, but we know it's there because of how the sentence is structured. It's like a scavenger hunt for words!