Syntactic movement

Syntactic movement

Syntactic movement is a fact that must be expressed somehow by every grammar of human languages and was first captured by structuralist linguists who called it "discontinuous constituents"; other terms are "displacement", or simply "movement" (cf. Graffi 2001). It aims at capturing the fact that certain constituents appear to have been displaced from the position where they receive important features of interpretation (cf. Carnie 2006).

Types of movements

A typical example is the following:

(1) which story does John told Peter that Mary knows of?

The phrase [which story] is interpreted as the object of "knows of" of rather than the object of "told", although it is closer to the latter verb. There can be different pieces of empirical evidence to support this intuition, based on pronoun interpretation or morphological case. For example, the possibility for a preverbal interrogative pronoun to be marked Accusative can only be explained if one assumes that it was moved from the postverbal object position, witness the ungrammaticality of (3):

(2) whom does he love?

(3) whom loves her?

Within generative grammar it has been traditionally proposed that there are two instances of movement. Argumental movement (A-movement) displacing a phrase in a position where a fixed grammatical function is assigned, such as in movement of the object to subject position in passives:

(4) the book was read

Non Argumental movement (A-bar movement) displacing a phrase in a position where a fixed grammatical function is not assigned, such as movement of the subject or the object to preverbal position in interrogatives:

(5) who do you think loves Mary?

(6) whom do you think Mary loves?

A different partition among types of movements is phrasal vs. head movement. In fact, not only a phrase can be displaced, but also the head of a phrase, such as for example in (7) where the helping verb will has been moved across the subject position:

(7) will John arrive tomorrow?

Constraints on movement

Since it was first proposed, the theory of syntactic movement yielded a new field of research aiming at providing the filters that block certain types of movement, also called locality theory. Examples of bad movement of the A-bar type are for example the following:

(8) who do you think that Mary visited Peter before calling?

Different types of locality theories are illustrated in Manzini (1992).

The representation of movement

There can be different ways to represent movement. In transformational grammar it has been signalled by a "trace" t, since at least the 1970s proposal by Noam Chomsky (cf. Chomsky 1975); another possibility which is common now is to assume that movement is in fact a process of copying the same constituent in different positions, deleting the phonological features in all but one case (cf. Chomsky 1995).

The reasons for movement

As for the reasons for movement there are at least two different lines of thought. The standard one, stemming from Chomsky's own proposal (cf. Chomsky 1995), is that it is driven by morphological-interpretative reasons (essentially, the idea that certain words containing morphological features like the wh-feature must be paired in a local configuration with similar morphological features); alternatively, it has been proposed that movement is rather driven by purely structural reasons related to the necessity to linearize words in a string (Dynamic Antisymmetry) based on a weak version of the so called Antisymmetry theory (cf. Moro 2000).

References

* Carnie, A. (2006) Syntax. A generative introduction. (II edition), Blackwell, Oxford, England.
* Chomsky, N. (1975) Reflections on Language, Pantheon Books, New York, 1975.
* Chomsky, N. (1995) The minimalist program, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
* Graffi, G. (2001) 200 Years of Syntax. A critical survey, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
* Manzini, R. (1992) Locality, Linguistic Inquiry Monograph Series 19, MIT Press, Cambridge.
* Moro, A. (2000) Dynamic Antisymmetry, Linguistic Inquiry Monograph Series 38, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.


Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Поможем сделать НИР

Look at other dictionaries:

  • Movement paradox — A movement paradox is a grammatical phenomenon which, particularly according to proponents of lexical functional grammar, presents some problems for a transformational approach to syntax. Take the following example sentences: We talked about the… …   Wikipedia

  • Wh-movement — (or wh fronting or wh extraction) is a syntactic phenomenon found in many languages around the world, in which interrogative words (sometimes called wh words ) show a special word order. Unlike ordinary phrases, such wh words appear at the… …   Wikipedia

  • List of syntactic phenomena — A list of phenomena in syntax. * Anaphora * Agreement * Antecedent contained deletion * Differential Object Marking * Case * Clitics * Control * Dummy pronouns * Ergative verb * Existential clauses * Expletives * Heavy NP shift * Inverse copula… …   Wikipedia

  • Move α — is a feature of the so called Revised Extended Standard Theory (REST) of transformational grammar developed by Noam Chomsky in the late 1970s. The term refers to the relation between an indexed constituent and its trace t, e.g., the relation of… …   Wikipedia

  • Clitic doubling — In linguistics, clitic doubling, or pronominal reduplication is a phenomenon by which clitic pronouns appear in verb phrases together with the full noun phrases that they refer to (as opposed to the cases where such pronouns and full noun phrases …   Wikipedia

  • Locality (linguistics) — In linguistics, locality refers to the proximity of elements of a linguistic structure. Theories of transformational grammar attempt to explain restrictions on syntactic movement using syntactic locality constraints …   Wikipedia

  • Andrea Moro — (born July 24, 1962 in Pavia) is an Italian linguist.Moro is currently full professor of general linguistics at the Vita Salute San Raffaele University in Milan, Italy. His main fields of research are syntax, where he has made notable… …   Wikipedia

  • Syntax — Syntactic redirects here. For another meaning of the adjective, see Syntaxis. For other uses, see Syntax (disambiguation). Linguistics …   Wikipedia

  • PROSODY, HEBREW — This article is a survey of the history of Hebrew poetic forms from the Bible to the present time. The entry is arranged according to the following outline: introduction the variety of formal systems the specific nature of hebrew literary history …   Encyclopedia of Judaism

  • Minimalist program — Linguistics …   Wikipedia

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”