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Concept
Syntactic movement
Summary
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. Some constituents appear to have been displaced from the position in which they receive important features of interpretation. 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.
Movement is the traditional means of explaining discontinuities such as wh-fronting, topicalization, extraposition, scrambling, inversion, and shifting:
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.
Official source
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