Syntactic movement

Syntactic movement is the means by which some theories of syntax address discontinuities. Movement was first postulated by structuralist linguists who expressed it in terms of discontinuous constituents or displacement.^[1] Some constituents appear to have been displaced from the position in which they receive important features of interpretation.^[2] The concept of movement is controversial and is associated with so-called transformational or derivational theories of syntax (such as transformational grammar, government and binding theory, minimalist program). Representational theories (such as head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar, construction grammar, and most dependency grammars), in contrast, reject the notion of movement and often instead address discontinuities with other mechanisms including graph reentrancies, feature passing, and type shifters.

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So let’s talk about traces. Whatever technology or magic you may have, it’s nearly impossible to make your way through the world without leaving some evidence of how you got there. And it’s no different for language – whenever we move words around inside of our sentences, there’s always something left behind, even if we can’t hear it. So let’s set out to track that down! I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is The Ling Space. So first of all, we’re returning to talk about syntax, so if you feel like you need a refresher, you can click here to watch our previous episode on the topic. Syntax tells us that our language comes with a set of blueprints for how to put our phrases together, and we reach for those structures and templates when we want to build our sentences. We just slot the words into the right places to craft the meanings that we want. When we think about it that way, it doesn’t sound as if we’ll ever need to move our words around. Why not just stick all the words exactly where we want them, in the surface order we say them, every single time? That seems a lot simpler than putting things in one place, and then moving them around later to wherever they’re supposed to end up. Maybe building sentences should be like crafting robots: you put all the pieces into the frame, and then you fix them there. That’s a nice idea, but it turns out that it doesn’t really mesh with our intuitions about language, like the relationships one version of a sentence has with another. The easiest way to check this out for English is by looking at questions. Let’s say you’re talking with your friend Kat after class, and she says, “Annie will show the forest to Andrew.” But it’s too noisy, and you don’t really get the name of the person who’s taking this arboreal tour. So what do you do? You ask, “Who will Annie show the forest to?” And for the sake of making this comparison easy, let’s say the answer is, “She will show the forest to Andrew.” So we can feel the connection between these sentences, right? All that’s changed when we made the question is that we’ve moved will in front of Annie, and that we’ve swapped who for Andrew, and then moved that who to the very front of the sentence. We can see that question and answer are just like two sides of the same coin. Okay, sure, so maybe you can see the connection between these two sentences, but maybe you’re thinking, why does that mean that the question has to come from the regular sentence? Can’t they just be two independent sentences? Well, if who will just got plopped at the beginning of a brand new sentence, and nothing had moved around, we might get a tree like this. But then there’d be no reason not to, say, stick some other words in the places in the tree that those words would normally go. If the who didn’t come from down below the verb there, referring to the person getting shown around the wondrous, magical forest, then there’s no reason why that person needs to be Andrew. You could stick somebody else in there, like, Parley. And the same thing should be true of will; if that didn’t move up from the spot on the other side of the subject, then we should be able to put some other word in there, like a should. Now, let’s go ahead and try that, then. How does this sentence sound: “Who will Annie should show the forest to Parley?” I don’t know about you, but to me, that is one terrible, garbage sentence of English. Just right out. The reason for that is, making questions in English requires movement. And when you move a word out of its original place, you leave a little trace of it behind. It has to make sure that nothing else makes its shadowy way into its home court, or everything goes totally nuts. Traces can even keep you from contracting words, like changing “want to” to “wanna.” Like, think about a sentence like “Annie wants Parley to defeat the ghost.” Now, you can’t contract want and to, because Parley’s in the way. There’s no “Annie wanna Parley defeat” anything. But if you make it a question, you can get Parley out of the way, and end up with something like “Who does Annie want to defeat the ghost?’ You might think that now, we could put a “wanna” in there if we want to, but we can’t. “Who does Annie wanna defeat the ghost?” is pretty bad. That little trace from where who originally came from might not be audible, but it’s enough to keep want and to apart. And the traces are kind of like placeholders for the words that got shifted around. And if you ignore the trace, the sentence gets super broken! That shows us that the question and its answer must be related, rather than them being built independently. And the way they’re related is through moving things around. If you didn’t have those traces, if they weren’t left in the structure that you’re building once you moved the original word, then your system could stick other elements in there and just gum up the whole sentence works. But this isn’t the only thing that movement is important for. We want to be able to capture every language in the world with the syntactic system we have. That’s just part of the Universal Grammar project. All languages have to work from the same stuff underlyingly, if we want to say all humans have the same systems. Vietnamese and Pashto and Igbo may look really different from each other. But we want to say they’re all built from the same syntactic building blocks, if you pry open their language casings and look inside. And it turns out, if we have those X’ templates, and we have the ability to move words around in a sentence, that’s all we need. We can capture a lot of the similarities and differences between languages by looking at how they move things. Let’s compare English and French, and what they do with their verbs. English verbs are very lazy, just staying down in the verb phrase where they’re put and never getting out. French verbs, on the other hand, cheerily move up out of the verb phrase, into where the tense goes, if there’s no tense there already. How do we know this? Well, it explains a lot about where words show up in relation to each other for English and French. Let’s look at a couple of examples. In English, we find the verb just after negation, like in “Jones did not smile at the students”. French does the same thing… as long as the verb is in the past tense. That gives you “Jones a pas souri aux élevès”. But when the sentence is in present tense, that a goes away. And then there’s nothing to hold the tense! The tense needs to attach to something, or the whole sentence will fail. Luckily, French verbs are on the ball, and know just what to do. The verb moves up, leaving its trace behind. And so, in present tense, the verb comes before negation, like in “Jones sourit pas aux élevès”. Or, we can see a similar thing happening for adverbs. In English, we find the verb coming after the adverb, like in the sentence like “Coyote joyously laughs”. In French, on the other hand, the adverb comes after the verb, like in the counterpart sentence “Coyote rit joyeusement.” And it’s for the same reasons: something needs to hold the tense, and the verb takes on the job. On the surface, it might not look like these phenomena are connected. After all, adverbs and negation are about as different as a fox spirit and a dragon hunter. But if you look at the structure, you can see that adverbs and negation both sit right on top of the verb phrase. And if we just say that the verb can move around, then we can capture what’s going on in both of them, and bring fox spirits and dragon hunters closer together. So if you have the verb showing up right after them, as in English, then the verb can’t have moved. But if the verb is showing up before pas or joyeusement, then it must be up above those in the tree. So movement allows us to capture the way languages behave. English and French might look different, but underneath, we can find deep similarities in the operations they use to put things together. Everybody uses the same gears; it’s just how you hook them up to each other that’s different. And even the stealthiest of movements can’t shift things around without leaving a little something behind. So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week. If you traced all of my word movements, you learned that we can shift words around to create different kinds of sentences; that whenever we move something, we always leave a trace behind; that we can tell there must be traces by seeing what kinds of sentences we can’t make; and that different languages choose to move around different elements when they’re crafting their syntax. The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost, and it’s written by both of us. Our production assistant is Georges Coulombe, our music and sound design is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE. We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our website, where we have some extra materials on this topic. Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, and if you want to keep expanding your own personal Ling Space, please subscribe. And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Sampai jumpa!

Illustration

Movement is the traditional means of explaining discontinuities such as wh-fronting, topicalization, extraposition, scrambling, inversion, and shifting:^[3]

a. John has told Peter that Mary likes the first story.

b. Which story has John told Peter that Mary likes ___? - Wh-fronting

a. We want to hear that one story again.

b. That one story we want to hear ___ again. - Topicalization

a. Something that we weren't expecting occurred.

b. Something ___ occurred that we weren't expecting. - Extraposition

a. You will understand.

b. Will you ___ understand? - Inversion

a. She took off her hat.

b. She took her hat off ___. - Shifting

The a-sentences show canonical word order, and the b-sentences illustrate the discontinuities that movement seeks to explain. Bold script marks the expression that is moved, and underscores mark the positions from which movement is assumed to have occurred. In the first a-sentence, the constituent the first story serves as the object of the verb likes and appears in its canonical position immediately following that verb. In the first b-sentence, the constituent which story likewise serves as the object of the verb, but appears at the beginning of the sentence rather than in its canonical position following the verb. Movement-based analyses explain this fact by positing that the constituent is base-generated in its canonical position but is moved to the beginning of the sentence, in this case because of a question-forming operation.

Representation of movement

The examples above use an underscore to mark the position from which movement is assumed to have occurred. In formal theories of movement, these underscores correspond to actual syntactic objects, either traces or copies depending on one's particular theory.^[4] e.g.

b. Which story₁ has John told Peter that Mary likes t₁? - Movement indicated using a trace

Subscripts help indicate the constituent that is assumed to have left a trace in its former position, the position marked by t.^[5] The other means of indicating movement is in terms of copies. Movement is actually taken to be a process of copying the same constituent in different positions and deleting the phonological features in all but one case.^[6] Italics are used in the following example to indicate a copy that lacks phonological representation:

b. Which story has John told Peter that Mary likes which story? - Copy indicated using italics

There are various nuances associated with each of the means of indicating movement (blanks, traces, copies), but for the most part, each convention has the same goal of indicating the presence of a discontinuity.

Types of movement

Within generative grammar, various types of movement have been distinguished. An important distinction is the one between head movement and phrasal movement, with the latter type being further subdivided into A-movement and A-bar movement. Copy movement is another more general type of movement.

A-movement vs. A-bar movement

Argument movement (A-movement) displaces a phrase into a position in which a fixed grammatical function is assigned, such as in movement of the object to the subject position in passives:^[7]

a. Fred read the book.

b. The book was read ___ (by Fred). - A-movement

Non-argument movement (A-bar movement or A'-movement), in contrast, displaces a phrase into a position where a fixed grammatical function is not assigned, such as the movement of a subject or object NP to a pre-verbal position in interrogatives:

a. You think Fred loves Mary.

b. Who do you think ___ loves Mary? - A-bar movement

a. You think Fred loves Mary.

b. Whom do you think Fred loves ___? - A-bar movement

The A- vs. A-bar distinction is a reference to the theoretical status of syntax with respect to the lexicon. The distinction elevates the role of syntax by locating the theory of voice (active vs. passive) almost entirely in syntax (as opposed to in the lexicon). A theory of syntax that locates the active-passive distinction in the lexicon (the passive is not derived via transformations from the active) rejects the distinction entirely.

Phrasal movement vs. head movement

A different partition among types of movement is phrasal vs. head movement.^[8] Phrasal movement occurs when the head of a phrase moves together with all its dependents in such a manner that the entire phrase moves. Most of the examples above involve phrasal movement. Head movement, in contrast, occurs when just the head of a phrase moves, and the head leaves behind its dependents. Subject-auxiliary inversion is a canonical instance of head movement:

a. Someone has read the article.

b. Has someone ___ read the article? - Head movement of the auxiliary verb has

a. She will read the second article.

b. Will she ___ read the second article? - Head movement of the auxiliary verb will

On the assumption that the auxiliaries has and will are the heads of phrases, such as of IPs (inflection phrases), the b-sentences are the result of head movement, and the auxiliary verbs has and will move leftward without taking with them the rest of the phrase that they head.

The distinction between phrasal movement and head movement relies crucially on the assumption that movement is occurring leftward. An analysis of subject-auxiliary inversion that acknowledges rightward movement can dispense with head movement entirely:

a. Someone has read the article.

b. ___ Has someone read the article? - Phrasal movement of the subject pronoun someone

a. She will read the second article.

b. ___ Will she read the second article? - Phrasal movement of the subject pronoun she

The analysis shown in those sentences views the subject pronouns someone and she as moving rightward, instead of the auxiliary verbs moving leftward. Since the pronouns lack dependents (they alone qualify as complete phrases), there would be no reason to assume head movement.

Islands and barriers to movement

Since it was first proposed, the theory of syntactic movement has yielded a new field of research aiming at providing the filters that block certain types of movement. Called locality theory,^[9] it is interested in discerning the islands and barriers to movement. It strives to identify the categories and constellations that block movement from occurring. In other words, it strives to explain the failure of certain attempts at movement:

a. You think that Mary visited Peter before calling Fred.

b. *Who do you think that Mary visited Peter before calling ___? – Attempt fails to move Fred/who out of the adjunct before calling Fred.

a. Your picture of Fred was funny.

b. *Who was your picture of ___ funny? - Attempt fails to move Fred/who out of the subject NP your picture of Fred; note that "Who was your funny picture of?" or, more formally but less idiomatically, "Of whom was your funny picture?" are acceptable.

a. You like Bill's ideas.

b. *Whose do you like ___ ideas? - Attempt fails to move Bill's/whose out of the object NP Bill's ideas (but "Whose ideas do you like?" is acceptable).

All of the b-sentences are now disallowed because of locality constraints on movement. Adjuncts and subjects are islands that block movement, and left branches in NPs are barriers that prevent pre-noun modifiers from being extracted out of NPS.

Feature passing

Syntactic movement is controversial, especially in light of movement paradoxes. Theories of syntax that posit feature passing reject syntactic movement outright, that is, they reject the notion that a given "moved" constituent ever appears in its "base" position below the surface: the positions marked by blanks, traces, or copies. Instead, they assume that there is but one level of syntax, and all constituents appear only in their surface positions, with no underlying level or derivation. To address discontinuities, they posit that the features of a displaced constituent are passed up and/or down the syntactic hierarchy between that constituent and its governor.^[10] The following tree illustrates the feature passing analysis of a wh-discontinuity in a dependency grammar.^[11]

The words in red mark the catena (chain of words) that connects the displaced wh-constituent what to its governor eat, the word that licenses its appearance.^[12] The assumption is that features (=information) associated with what (e.g. noun, direct object) are passed up and down along the catena marked in red. In that manner, the ability of eat to subcategorize for a direct object NP is acknowledged. By examining the nature of catenae like the one in red, the locality constraints on discontinuities can be identified.

Traces

In government and binding theory and some of its descendant theories, movement leaves behind an empty category called a trace.

a. You like eating porridge.

b. What do you like eating t.

In such theories, traces are considered real parts of syntactic structure, detectable in secondary effects they have on the syntax. For instance, one empirical argument for their existence comes from the English phenomenon of wanna contraction, in which want to contracts into wanna. This phenomenon has been argued to be impossible when a trace would intervene between "want" and "to", as in the b-sentence below.^[13]

a. Who does Vicky want to vote for t? → Who does Vicky wanna vote for?

b. Who does Vicky want t to win? → *Who does Vicky wanna win?

Evidence of this sort has not led to a full consensus in favor of traces, since other kinds of contraction permit an intervening putative trace.^[14]

a. Who does Kim think t is beneath contempt? → Who does Kim think's beneath contempt?

b. Who does Kim think t will be late? → Who does Kim think'll be late?

c. What does Kim imagine t has been happening? → What does Kim imagine's been happening?

Proponents of the trace theory have responded to these counterarguments in various ways. For instance, Bresnan (1971) argued that contractions of "to" are enclitic while contractions of tensed auxiliaries are proclitic, meaning that only the former would be affected by a preceding trace.^[15]

References

^ Concerning the terminology of movement, see Graffi (2001).
^ Concerning the interpretation of features as the motivation for movement, see Carnie (2013:393ff.).
^ See Roberts (1997:35f.) and Haegeman and Guéron (1999:32) for introductions to the concept of movement.
^ See Chomsky (1975) for an early example of the use of traces to mark movement.
^ For examples of t used in such a manner, see for instance Ouhalla (1994:63) and Haegeman and Guéron (1999:172).
^ See Chomsky (1995) concerning the copy theory of movement.
^ See, for instance, Ouhalla (1994:161f.) and Radford (2004:176ff.) concerning the distinction between A- and A-bar positions.
^ Concerning head movement, see, for instance, Ouhalla (1994:284f.), Radford (2004:123ff.) and Carnie (2013:289ff.).
^ See Manzini (1992) for illustrations of different types of locality theories.
^ The classic article that rejects movement and presents and defends an approach to discontinuities in terms of feature passing (the slash feature) is Gazdar (1981).
^ This dependency tree is produced to illustrate the concept of feature passing and is consistent with the DG analysis of discontinuities in Groß and Osborne (2009).
^ The catena unit is presented and discussed at length in Osborne et al. (2012).
^ For a discussion of wanna contraction as a source of support for the existence of traces, see Radford (1997: 269ff.) Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English: A Minimalist Approach, CUP 1997, p. 269ff.
^ These examples are taken from Sag and Fodor (1994).
^ For more regarding this debate, see Bresnan (1971), Postal and Pullum (1982), Kaisse (1983), Bošković (1997), among others.

Sources

Carnie, A. 2013. Syntax. A generative introduction. 3rd edition. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
Chomsky, N. 1975. Reflections on Language. New York: Pantheon Books.
Chomsky, N. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Gazdar, G. 1981. Unbounded dependencies and coordinate structure. Linguistic Inquiry 12, 155–184.
Groß, T. and T. Osborne 2009. Toward a practical dependency grammar theory of discontinuities. SKY Journal of Linguistics 22, 43-90.
Haegeman, L. and J. Guéron. 1999. English grammar: A generative perspective. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers.
Graffi, G. 2001. 200 Years of Syntax: A critical survey. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Manzini, R. 1992. Locality, Linguistic Inquiry Monograph Series 19. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Osborne, T., M. Putnam, and T. Groß 2012. Catenae: Introducing a novel unit of syntactic analysis. Syntax 15, 4, 354–396.
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Sag, Ivan and J. D. Fodor. 1994. Extraction without traces. In R. Aranovich, W. Byrne, S. Preuss and M. Senturia (eds.), Proceedings of the Thirteenth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 365–384. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications/SLA. http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/papers/sag-fodor-wccfl.pdf.
Corver, Norbert and Jairo Nunes. 2007. The Copy Theory of Movement. Vol. 107;Bd. 107.;. Amsterdam;Philadelphia;: John Benjamins Pub. Co.
Lai, Jackie Yan-Ki. 2019. "Parallel Copying in Dislocation Copying: Evidence from Cantonese." Journal of East Asian Linguistics 28 (3): 243-277.
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This page was last edited on 27 February 2024, at 00:22

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