Summary Details
| Query: |
Movement Paradoxes
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| Author: | Carsten Breul | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Syntax
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| Summary: |
Dear all,
what follows is the summary of the responses to my query on movement paradoxes (see issue 12-2826, http://linguistlist.org/issues/12/12-2826.html#1). I will not repeat the query here because of the already considerable length of the present message. Every reply I have got was helpful -- from reminding me of something which I had forgotten, over confronting me with further interesting observations to providing bibliographical leads. Below I pick out some of the points made, and give the bibliographical references (some of which mentioned in more than one message) which are directly concerned with movement paradoxes in P&P and MP frameworks. The most extensive reply that I have got is from Norio Nasu. His message provides a very informative bird's eye view on movement paradoxes, giving much theoretical background and many more references (some of which also mentioned in replies by other respondents). Norio Nasu allowed me to quote extensively from his reply, which I am happy to do further below. The examples from Ward 1986/1988 (repeated at the end of this message as (3)) have been found dubious by And Rosta (speaker of BrE), who tends to think of such cases as performance errors: ''[...] by the time the speaker gets to the auxiliary before the gap, they have forgotten the morphosyntactic form of the fronted V, so the paradoxes would be due to shortterm memory failures. I'd still conjecture that if US English [see also below] is different it arose, diachronically, from a grammaticization of such performance errors.'' For one AmE informant (3a) is ungrammatical and needs _did_ instead of _have_. For another respondent (BrE), _did_ is needed instead of _have_ in (3d) and preferable in (3c) as well; other similar examples, such as (4) They said we should stand firm, and stand firm we have are judged ok, though. For a third respondent (AmE), Ward's judgments are ok, and (5) We had to stand firm, and stood firm we have i.e. the version of (3d) where the perfective participle is used instead of the infinitive, is odd. Actually, Ward (ib.) also observes that in some cases a preposed infinitive is preferred over a preposed perfective participle. For still another speaker of AmE the versions where the verb in front position has the perfective participle form are not only odd, but ''consistently ungrammatical''. It seems that we have quite significant idiolectal and/or dialectal differences here. It was suggested that a Spanish example like (6) Ver no lo vi ver: see-INF; no: not; lo: him; vi: saw (I'm not sure what the best English translation of this construction is) may involve something similar as the movement-paradox examples. My impression is that (6) is rather a type of left dislocation/hanging topic construction. But this is, first, an uninformed guess of mine and, second, not to imply that the English constructions discussed above and this Spanish one have nothing in common. The Bresnan-judgments of (1a,b, 2a,b) (repeated at the end of this message) including the note that sentences like (2a) are accepted by some speakers, are found plausible by two of the respondents who commented on them. Carson Schutze suspects ''that people who think [(1a, 2a)] sound OK are actually imagining that 'the fact' occurs before the in situ that-clause.'' For one speaker (1b, 2b) need a pause after the _that_-clause in front position. It is interesting to note in this context that for one speaker who comments on the Bresnan-example (Ib) mentioned by Norio Nasu (see below), ''the star is at most a question mark.'' As the type of Bresnan-examples instantiated by Norio Nasu's (Ia,b) involves what is commonly considered to be A- movement in contrast to A'-movement as in (1, 2) which show fronting/topicalisation/preposing, this judgment casts doubt on the existence of a movement-paradox in this type of A-movement context. Kleanthes Grohmann proposes that the binding- and island- behaviour of the _that_-clause in front position be tested in order to find out whether it can be assumed to have moved there in the first place (for applications of such tests see e.g. Grohmann, K. 2000: Prolific peripheries, Diss. U of Maryland; 2000: ''Copy left dislocation'' in: Proceedings of the 19th West Coast Conference On Formal Linguistics; 2000: ''A movement approach to contrastive left dislocation'' in: Rivista di Grammatica Generativa 25). For example, finding a consistent pattern of judgments with respect to (7) under the distributive reading of the possessive may tell us if (7a) patterns with (7b), suggesting movement, or with (7c), not suggesting movement. (7) a. [That his-i father was wrong] every-i boy talked about for days. b. His-i father, every-i boy talked about a lot. c. His-i father, every-i boy talks about him. Annabel Cormack and Niina Zhang point out that 'movement paradoxes' may be problematic for the copy theory of movement, but not necessarily for alternative approaches (see e.g. Epstein, S. E. & Groat, R. & Kawashima, H. Kitahara, 1998: A Derivational Approach to Syntactic Relations, Oxford University Press; Cormack, Annabel & Smith, Neil, 2000: ''Fronting: The syntax and pragmatics of 'focus' and 'topic''': UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 12). Carson Schutze proposes the following solution of the movement paradox: ''I think there's a pretty simple story to be told here, which I however haven't seen in the literature: prepositions are unpronounced when they precede a clause. (Cf. the fact that in some languages, case markers are unpronounced on a DP adjacent to a verb, but obligatory if the DP is moved; or the fact that in English, infinitival complements to verbs like 'want' must be introduced by 'for' except when that complement is adjacent to the verb.) I.e., this is a fairly 'superficial' PF fact about English, consistent with the fact that in Icelandic, for example, prepositions take CP complements with no problem. (Thus, for example, a story along the lines of Stowell's Case Resistance Principle cannot be right, unless one can find evidence that the Icelandic 'CPs' are really of a different syntactic category from English CPs.)'' I suggest to take also the following (perhaps even simpler) story into account: It can be assumed that the sources of (1b, 2b) are not those in which _of_ and _about_ take a _that_-clause as complement, but a [the fact that ...]-DP: (8) a. he didn't think of [the fact that he might be wrong] > [the fact that he might be wrong] he didn't think of _t_ b. we talked about [the fact that he was sick for days] > [the fact that he was sick] we talked about _t_ for days The string _the fact_ can then be assumed to be deleted in the phonological component of the grammar or, perhaps preferably, during phonetic processing in performance. The bibliographical hints I have got for P&P or MP analyses directly concerned with the paradoxes are these: Boskovic, Z. 1994: ''Case properties of clauses and the Greed principle'': Studia Linguistica 49: 32-53. Oku, Satoshi. 1998: A theory of selection and reconstruction in the minimalist perspective. Diss U of Connecticut. Oku, Satoshi. 1996: ''Perfective participle paradox in English VP-fronting. In: Green, Antony Dubach & Motapanyane, Virginia (eds.). 1996: Proceedings of the thirteenth Eastern States conference on linguistics '96. Ithaca: Cornell U. 282-293. Webelhuth, Gert. 1992: Principles and parameters of syntactic saturation. New York & Oxford: OUP. **** Extensive quotes from Norio Nasu's reply: You can find an analysis of the patterns like your (1) and (2) in Boskovic (1994). In addition to the data of topicalisation/preposing, similar paradoxes are found in A-movement as well. For instance,Bresnan (2001:17) gives the following examples: (I) a. That languages are learnable is captured by this theory. b. *This theory captures that languages are learnable. cf. This theory captures the fact that languages are learnable. (Bresnan 2001:17) Additionally, movement paradoxes can be seen as a matter of reconstruction. That is, sentences like (Ia, b) exhibit the circumstance where a moved category cannot be put back to its original position. From this viewpoint, the following sentences also exhibit a similar paradox. (II) a. The claim that John-1 was asleep seems to him-1 to be correct. (Chomsky 1995:204) b. *It seems to him-1 that John-1 was asleep. (IIb) violates Condition C of the binding theory. The question is why (IIa) doesn't violate this condition. Considering that the subject 'the claim that John was sleep' is moved from the infinitival complement, reconstruction of the subject into the embedded clause creates a structure where 'John' is bound by 'him.' In face of these paradoxes, there seem to be at least three approaches: (i) There is no movement. A seemingly moved category is in fact base-generated where it appears. (ii) Movement exists, but a moved category doesn't leave anything in its original position or leaves an element non- identical with it. (iii) Movement exists and a moved category leaves its copy. Movement paradoxes are attributable to some unknown factor(s). As far as A-movement is concerned, (i) is a position taken by constraint-based grammars like LFG and HPSG. There are, however, several works in the principles-and-parameters framework, which adopt (i). The most recent paper is Manzini and Roussou (2000). Williams (1994) also advocates the abolition of movement. Jacobson (1992) presents arguments for (i) in the framework of Categorial Grammar. Cormack and Smith (1997) may also be helpful. Nevertheless, movement paradoxes do not seem to lead immediately to the rejection of movement operations. The insight behind these phenomena is that a moved category and what it leaves behind are not always identical. This insight is reflected in the approach (ii) and the trace theory employed in the GB framework (cf. Fiengo 1977) might also belong to this group on the assumption that a trace is not identical with a moved category. Movement paradoxes may pose a more serious question to the copy theory of movement advocated by Chomsky (1995). In this respect, Lasnik (1999) for example considers that an argument does not leave any copy at all. In contrast to the data (seemingly) against movement (such as (I) above), it seems that the opposite possibility needs to be taken into consideration. That is, is there any phenomenon which indicates that a base position has to be postulated? What occurs to me in this connection is the phenomena called radical reconstruction or total reconstruction, whereby a moved category is forced to be interpreted in its base position. Of course radical/total reconstruction can also be accounted for without recourse to base positions of moved categories but it is equally possible to use the relevant data to argue for the existence of such positions. I have a chapter in my forthcoming PhD thesis (which will/has to be ready in two weeks time), where I explored this issue. Another point which seems to be of some relevance is the fact that there are certain differences between A- and A'- operations with respect to reconstruction. A common view is that an category undergoing A'-movement leaves its copy, whereas it remains controversial whether this is true for A- movement. On the other hand, movement paradoxes are found not only in A-movement but also in A'- movement and head- movement (see Bresnan 2001:18, 19). If movement paradoxes are regarded purely as a matter of reconstruction, it remains unclear how the A vs A' distinction in question should be handled. So, it seems to be desirable to examine whether movement paradoxes are really a matter of reconstruction. References: Boskovic, Z. 1994. Case properties of clauses and the Greed principle. _Studia Linguistica_ 49, 32-53. Chomsky, N. 1995. _The Minimalist Program_. MIT Press. Cormack, A. and N. Smith. 1997. Checking features and split signs. _UCL Working Papers in Linguistics_ 9. 223-252. Jacobson, P. 1992.Raising without movement. In R. K. Larson et al. (eds.) _Control and Grammar_. Dordrecht: Kluwer. 149- 194. Lasnik, H. 1999. Chains of arguments. In S. Epstein and N. Hornstein (eds.) _Working Minimalism_.Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 189-215. Manzini, M. R. and A. Roussou. 2000. A minimalist theory of A-movement and control. _Lingua_ 110. 409-447. Williams, Edwin. 1994. _Thematic Structure in Syntax_. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. *** (1) a. *He didn't think of that he might be wrong b. That he might be wrong he didn't think of (2) a. *We talked about that he was sick for days b. That he was sick we talked about for days (3) a. We had both been thrown into the water to sink or swim, and swim we had -- we had swum from very far apart b. They told him that he had to be there all day long and be there all day long he has! c. They provided us with enough beer to drink all day long and drink all day we have! d. We had to stand firm, and stand firm we have! Dr. Carsten Breul Universit?t Dortmund Institut f?r Anglistik und Amerikanistik Emil-Figge-Str. 50 44221 Dortmund Germany phone: (0231) 755-2898 e-mail: breul@englisch.fb15.uni-dortmund.de or carsten.breul@ruhr-uni-bochum.de |
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| LL Issue: | 12.2972 | |
| Date Posted: | 28-Nov-2001 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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