grammatical foundations

Theoretical Aspects of Movement

The three X-bar rules introduce three elements besides the head. The complement is introduced as the sister of the head. It always follows the head and is restricted by the head’s subcategorisation requirements. Thus, if a head selects for a PP complement, the complement must be a PP. The specifier is introduced as the sister to X©and daughter of XP. Specifiers precede the head and are restricted to one per phrase. The last element of the phrase, the adjunct, can be introduced at any X-bar level: X, X©and XP. This element expands what it is adjoined to into another element of the same type. Therefore the process is recursive and in principle any number of adjuncts can be added to a structure.

We will have far more to say about X-bar structures as we proceed through this book and many more examples of heads, complements, specifiers and adjuncts will be provided. However, all of these will conform to the basic principles set out here and as such the theory of structure provided by X-bar principles is an extremely general and explanatory one.

2 Theoretical Aspects of Movement

Consider a sentence such as the following:

(46)who does Harry hate?

The verb hate typically has two arguments, experiencer and theme, and is transitive with the theme as its object:

(47)Harry hates him

But in (46) the object appears to be missing. This is not a case of an ‘understood’ object, where the argument is present at a semantic level, as it is fairly obvious that the interrogative pronoun who has the grammatical function of the object. Yet, this pronoun is not sitting in the canonical object position, the complement of the verb, directly after it. Indeed, the interrogative pronoun is occupying a position that no other object can occupy:

(48)*him does Harry hate

The obvious questions to ask are: why is the object sitting at the front of the sentence in (46)?; and how is the interrogative pronoun interpreted as an object when it is not sitting in an object position? As to the first question the obvious answer is that it has something to do with the interrogative nature of the clause: the clause is a question and interrogative clauses of this kind start with an interrogative phrase such as who.

The second question is a little more difficult to answer. In English, an element typically is interpreted as object depending on the position it occupies:

(49)a Harry hates him b He hates Harry

In (49a), the pronoun him is interpreted as the object as it is sitting in the complement position. Harry on the other hand is the subject and is sitting in a specifier position. In (49b) it is the other way round: He is the subject, sitting in the specifier position, and Harry is the object, sitting in the complement position. If who in (46) is interpreted as

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object, we should expect it to occupy the object position. The grammar that we will be adopting in this book assumes that this is exactly the case: the interrogative pronoun does indeed sit in the object position at some level of description of this sentence. However, at another level of description, the interrogative pronoun is in another position, one at the beginning of the clause. The assumption then is that this element undergoes a movement which takes it from the object position into the sentence initial position.

Movement processes turn out to be a central aspect of grammar in many languages and we will see many instances of it in this book. In this section we will introduce the main theoretical considerations relating to movement processes and which play a role in the description of virtually all English sentences.

2.1Move

Once the idea has been put forward that things can move about within a sentence, we can see that it can be applied to a lot of linguistic phenomena:

(50)a the water was wasted b is this the end?

c this conclusion, virtually no one has ever come to d the plans were released for the new car park

In the first case in (50) we have a passive sentence in which the subject is interpreted as the object: the water was what was wasted, not what did the wasting. We might claim that in this case the object moves from object position into subject position:

In (50b) we have what is termed a yes–no question, as it may be answered with a simple “yes” or “no”. These questions typically involve subject–auxiliary inversion, in which the auxiliary verb and the subject appear to switch places. A more current view of the inversion process is that the auxiliary moves to a position to the left of the subject:

(52) a - this is the end

b is this - the end

(50c) involves topicalisation, a process which moves an element interpreted as a topic to the front of the sentence. A topic is typically something that has already been mentioned before in a conversation, or can be interpreted as easily accessible in a conversation due to the context. Consider the sentence in (50c), it is obvious that the conclusion mentioned must have been a part of the preceding discussion and that it has not just been newly introduced. We may analyse this sentence as:

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Finally in (50d) we see another kind of movement which appears to split a constituent across the structure. The preposition phrase for the new car park, is clearly related to the noun plans. Indeed, this PP is the complement of the noun:

(54)the plans for the new car park

However, the PP appears to have been moved out of the subject DP into the sentence final position. This process is known as extraposition:

As we saw in the previous section grammatical processes should be stated as simply and generally as possible if we are to provide a theory that can cover the basic fact of language learnability. This would argue against an approach to movement in which we provide many movement rules designed to capture the specific facts about individual movements. Instead we should follow the example of the previous section and provide a small number of general rules which have a wide applicability.

In fact the general assumption is that there is just one movement rule, usually called Move which can be stated as:

(56)Move

Move anything anywhere.

This might not seem a very wise kind of rule to allow in a grammar as it would seem to sanction complete chaos and English does not appear to be anything near chaotic in its grammatical organisation.

The rule in (56) indeed would sanction chaos if this were all there was to say about movement. However there is a good deal more to be said. Let us take X-bar structures into consideration. When an object moves to subject position in a passive construction it is moving from one DP position to another: complement of the verb to specifier position. Simplifying somewhat, we might suppose the following analysis:

-V

wasted

Here the main verb wasted takes its argument in the specifier position of its own phrase. This phrase is in turn the complement of the auxiliary verb was. The argument moves from the specifier of the lower verb to that of the higher one.

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The structure we end up with is one that is perfectly compatible with X-bar principles. In other words, the movement seems not to have radically altered the structure. Suppose we assume a restriction on all movements, that they cannot alter structures in a way that would violate basic X-bar principles:

(58)Structure Preservation Principle

no movement can alter the basic X-bar nature of structure

This would rule out immediately a very large class of movements possible under the assumption of (56).

The important point to recognise is that the assumption of (56) and the imposition of a restriction such as (58) offer a far simpler and general theory of what can move where than would a theory that was made up of lots of specific rules telling us what can move where and under what conditions in particular cases. Of course, (56) and (58) together still do not constitute a particularly accurate theory of movement and there are still many movements allowed under these assumptions that do not actually occur. However, even if we add five or ten more restrictions of the kind in (58) we would still have a more general theory of movement than the literally hundreds of movement rules that would be required to describe specific cases of movements. We will see that the number of restrictions required to capture the majority of facts about movement is surprisingly small.

2.2D-structure and S-structure

An immediate consequence of accepting movements as a part of grammatical description is that there are at least two levels that we can describe the structure of any sentence: a level before movement takes place and a level after movement has taken place.

(59)structure movement

structure

The difference between the two levels of structural description will simply be the positions that the moved elements occupy, given the above assumption that movements do not actually alter the structure. For example, consider the following two sentences:

(60)a Mary met Mark in the park b in the park, Mary met Mark

In (60a) the PP in the park is an adjunct to the VP, modifying the VP by adding information about where the meeting took place. In (60b) the PP has moved to the front of the sentence, in a similar way to that in which topics are moved to the front. We can call this movement preposing. Before the preposing takes place, the PP is in its VP adjoined position:

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DP VP

After the movement, the structure will look like this:

met Mark

We call the structure before movement takes place, a D-structure and the postmovement structure an S-structure. The ‘D’ and the ‘S’ originally stood for deep and surface, reflecting the fact that S-structures represent an ordering of the elements which is closer to that which holds in the externalisation of the sentence (its pronunciation, or whatever) while D-structures represent an abstract level of description more deeply embedded in the analysis. However, the words deep and surface have unfortunate connotations which may lead to misunderstanding. Deep, for example, can be taken to mean ‘meaningful’ or ‘ponderous’, while surface can mean ‘superficial’ or ‘apparent’. It would be wrong however to come to the conclusion that deep-structure is somehow more important or that surface-structure is irrelevant. These terms should be taken simply as referring to the two levels of the description of a sentence and neither one nor the other is any more important than the other. This is why the more neutral terms D-structure and S-structure are used and we will follow this tradition.

2.2.1 D-structure and Theta Theory

Let us consider the nature of D- and S-structure a little more closely. An obvious question is why it is that some elements start off in one position and then move to another. To answer this question we have to ask about why elements occupy the positions they do at any level of description. This is a matter of distribution: there are grammatical principles which determine the range of possible positions of categories of certain types. X-bar principles obviously have a large role to play in this, determining head, complement, specifier and adjunction positions. But as both D- and S-structures conform to X-bar principles, this clearly is not what differentiates the two. Obviously there must be other grammatical principles holding at D-structure which are not applicable at S-structure and vice versa.

A D-structure principle may then require a constituent X to occupy a certain position and an S-structure principle may require X to occupy a certain position, and if

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these two positions are not the same then X will have to move from its D-structure position to the required S-structure position. Thus, explaining movement is a matter of finding out the principles which determine the distribution of elements at D- and S- structure.

Turning to D-structure first, an important consideration which has been present in all developments of this concept, first proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s, is that D-structure positions are somehow basic. For example, in a passive sentence, what sits in the subject position at S-structure is interpreted as the object of the verb and hence is assumed to occupy the object position at D-structure:

The idea is that the way an element is interpreted in terms of its thematic status indicates its D-structure position and thus if something is interpreted as an object it will be in an object position at D-structure. Moreover, an element that is interpreted as the subject or object of a predicate will be in the relevant subject or object position of that predicate at D-structure:

In this example, although Ken is sitting in the subject position of the verb consider, this element is interpreted as the object of confused and thus is in the object position of this predicate at D-structure.

D-structure then is a pure representation of thematic relations. Anything which is interpreted as the subject or object of a given predicate will be in the subject or object position of that predicate at D-structure no matter where it is found at S-structure.

The principles that determine D-structure positions must therefore have something to do with thematic relationships. We saw in chapter 1 how -roles are encoded in the lexical entry of predicates. Yet in a sentence it is the arguments that are interpreted as bearing these -roles. It must be the case therefore that these -roles are given from the predicate to the argument. We can refer to this process as -role assignment. For example:

theme

(65) a [an unexpected package] arrived agent patient

b [Melanie] mended [the car]

The verb arrive is a one-place predicate, having one -role to assign which it assigns to the argument an unexpected package in (65a). The verb mend is a two-place predicate. It assigns the agent role to its subject and the patient role to its object.

Where can a predicate assign its -roles to? If there were no restrictions on this then arguments would not have distributions at D-structure as they could appear anywhere. We are assuming that this is not so and hence there must be conditions which determine where -roles can be assigned. One fairly clear condition on -role

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assignment that can be seen in (64) is that -roles are not assigned over long distances. For an argument to receive a -role from a predicate it must be close to it. We can see this from the fact that the following sentence has just one interpretation:

(66)Sophie suspects that Linda loves Dwain

We can only interpret this sentence with Sophie doing the suspecting, Linda doing the loving and Dwain getting loved and there is no way to get Sophie associated with love or Linda and Dwain with suspect. This is simply because Sophie is structurally closer to suspect and Linda and Dwain are close to love. If love could assign its - roles over long distances, Sophie might be able to be interpreted as one of its arguments.

We will adopt the following restrictive condition on -role assignment:

(67)the Locality Restriction on Theta-role Assignment

a predicate assigns its -roles to either its complement or its specifier

According to (67), the structural configuration for all -role assignment is as follows:

YP X©

X YP

It is a long standing assumption that there is a uniformity in -role assignment which links certain -roles to certain positions. The reason why the object is assumed to move in a passive sentence is precisely because of this assumption. In an active sentence the object occupies the object position, following the verb, and so it is assumed that in the passive sentence the argument that is interpreted identically to the object in the active originates from the same position that we see it in in the active:

Thus it is assumed that there is a uniform position to which the patient -role is assigned across different structures. We will actually adopt a very rigid form of this idea which was first proposed by Baker (1988), called the Uniform Theta-role Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH):

(70)the Uniform Theta-role Assignment Hypothesis

a -role Þ is assigned in the same structural configuration in all structures in which it is present

Thus, if we propose that the theme argument is assigned to the specifier of the verb it is related to in a structure such as:

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Then it follows from the UTAH that all themes in all structures will be assigned to the specifier of the verb that they are related to. We will see that this is a very restrictive theory of -role assignment that will force certain analyses of structures which, while not at first obvious, turn out to have a number of positive features which go to support them and in turn this supports the assumption of the UTAH in the first place.

There are other aspects of the assignment of -roles than those to do with where they are assigned. We saw in chapter 1 that for some predicates an argument that they select as a lexical property does not have to be realised as a syntactic entity but may be present only at a semantic level. Such an argument would be understood, but unable to play any role in a sentence such as licensing a reflexive pronoun:

(72)a Paul ate the pie by itself b *Paul ate by itself

This means that certain -roles do not have to be assigned within a structure. However, the same is not true for other predicates:

(73)a Fiona found the book b *Fiona found

c *found the book

It is not well understood what determines when a -role may be left understood, but it seems to be an idiosyncratic property of certain predicates. It is generally the case that-roles must be assigned. The -role assigned to the subject, for example, cannot be left as understood. Therefore we might propose that there is a general grammatical condition ensuring the assignment of -roles, unless they are marked in the lexical entry of a predicate as being able to be understood. Moreover, a theta role can only be assigned to one argument and cannot be ‘shared out’ between more than one:

(74)*Fiona found the book the pen

We might propose the following condition on -role assignment:

(75)a -role must be assigned to one and only one argument

Now if we turn our attention to the arguments themselves we note that it is not possible to have an argument that is not assigned a -role:

(76)a Sam smiled

b *Sam smiled the cat

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The verb smile is intransitive and therefore does not have a -role to assign to an object. If we provide this verb with an object, we therefore have an argument that receives no -role, which as we see from (76) is ungrammatical. Moreover, an argument cannot receive more than one -role. So if a predicate must assign more than one -role, it cannot assign them both to the same argument:

(77) a Fred fancies himself

b *Fred fancies

If it were possible for one argument to bear both -roles of a predicate, (77b) would mean the same thing as (77a) which has a reflexive pronoun in one argument position taking its reference from the other argument. The unacceptability of (77b) can therefore not be a semantic fact.

It is also not possible for an argument to bear two -roles assigned from different predicates. Consider the following:

(78)Knut knows Dennis danced

This sentence is grammatical, but only with the interpretation that what Knut knows is that Dennis danced. In other words, the arguments of know are Knut, a DP, and Dennis danced, a sentence in which Dennis is the argument of danced:

(79)Knut knows [Dennis danced]

What is not possible is to interpret Dennis as being the one who is known and the one who dances:

(80)*Knut knows [Dennis] danced

Again this would involve one argument bearing more than one -role, which appears to be impossible.

In addition to (75) therefore, we might propose the following restriction:

(81)an argument must bear one and only one -role

Together the conditions in (75) and (81) are called the Theta Criterion:

(82)The Theta Criterion

a -role must be assigned to one and only one argument an argument must bear one and only one -role

We have now reviewed three simple and basic principles which regulate the assignment of -roles within a structure: the Locality Condition on Theta-role Assignment, the UTAH and the Theta Criterion. All of these apply to D-structures, restricting the distribution of arguments at this level of representation. Collectively, the principles which govern -role assignment are often referred to as Theta Theory and this can be considered as a part of the grammar, similar to the principles of X-bar theory which regulate the general formation of structures. A final important contributor to the well-

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formedness conditions of D-structure is the lexicon which provides structures with categorial information and Theta theory with the -roles to be assigned. We might represent this in the following way:

D-structure Theta theory

movement

S-structure

2.2.2 S-structure and Case Theory

So far we have looked at some of the principles governing the distribution of arguments at D-structure. In order to understand movement we must now consider some of the principles that apply at S-structure which determine the distribution of arguments at this level.

In chapter 2 we mentioned the grammatical notion of Case, pointing out that certain pronouns in English have different Case forms. Nominative pronouns include he, she, I and we while accusative pronouns are him, her, me and us. What determines which form the pronoun appears in is apparently its S-structure position. If a pronoun is the subject of a finite clause it will be nominative, anywhere else it is accusative (we ignore the possessor position inside the DP which is associated with genitive Case: his, her, my and our):

(84)a he has helped her

b I consider [him to be unkind to us]

In (84a) the clause is finite as tense is marked on the auxiliary verb. The subject he is in the nominative form, not the accusative him. However, the object of the verb help, her, is in the accusative not the nominative she. In (84b), while the main clause is finite and has a nominative subject, I, the embedded clause is non-finite. This clause has an accusative subject him. The object of the preposition in this clause is also accusative, us.

Now consider the following example:

(85)he was helped

The pronoun is in the subject of a finite clause and so naturally is in the nominative. However, as this clause is passive, the pronoun originates from the object position at D-structure. But this fact does not seem to have any bearing on the case of the pronoun: the pronoun is nominative not accusative as a non-moved object would be. Clearly, then, it is the position that a pronoun sits in at S-structure that determines its case. We might claim therefore that there are positions which are Case positions, specifically nominative positions and accusative positions, and there are positions which are not Case positions.

But if there are nominative and accusative case positions, what are we to say about the non-pronominal DPs that sit in these positions as no other DP demonstrates

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