5
votes
Why two appearances of the past participle "ganado" in this derivation?
One of the main reasons for positing a v layer separate from V is the behavior of ditransitive verbs. In particular, all the objects of a ditransitive verb seem to form a constituent of their own, ...
- 62.2k
5
votes
Accepted
Question on move operation
First, let me get the usual caveats out of the way: MP is a program, not a theory. It tells you what kinds of questions to ask about syntax, and guides you in comparing the answers from competing ...
- 2,625
5
votes
How do contractions work in syntactic movement?
I'm not convinced the notion "clitic" is really needful to explain what is going on. Some syntactic rules depend on what the words are, and you can't always trust traditional English orthography to ...
- 12.4k
5
votes
How do contractions work in syntactic movement?
Summarizing the paper by Zwicky and Pullum commented by @sumelic above: They suggest that most contractions are clitics, but <-n't> is an inflection.
Most English contractions, such as <-'s> &...
- 6,836
4
votes
Accepted
Why do 'wonder' and 'think' act differently in wh-movement?
Wonder takes an embedded interrogative complement with its own internal trace:
You wonder who John saw t.
You wonder who t saw John.
You wonder why I left t.
When you front that wh- you're ...
- 1,490
4
votes
Can a TG generate sentences which a CFG cannot generate?
A transformational grammar G is a tuple (P,T) where P is some context-sensitive (e.g. context free) grammar (the 'base component' of G) and T is a finite sequence of transformations over the alphabet ...
- 3,760
4
votes
What is HMC in generative grammar?
This stands for "Head Movement Constraint". It was introduced by Lisa Travis in her 1984 MIT dissertation Parameters and Effects of Word Order Variation, p. 131:
Head Movement Constraint: ...
- 3,760
3
votes
Accepted
Restrictions on Wh-movement
Successive cyclic wh-movement is motivated by theoretical principles of minimal computation, as well as empirical data. There's nothing inherently wrong with the 'one fell swoop' analysis, but cyclic ...
- 336
3
votes
Is 'raising' an outdated concept in modern linguistics?
No, Raising is alive and well, but the conception of Raising as a transformation is moribund, because transformations are no longer accepted. So, if we believe in Raising, and Raising is a ...
- 12.4k
3
votes
V to T movement in German
du Schach gespielt hast as you say is an embedded clause, and string-identical to the underlying form Carnie is referring to. (To answer your first question.)
As for the question on how to detect V-&...
- 638
3
votes
X-bar theory without movement
You might want to have a look at LFG, they use X' Theory extended with an additional "lexocentric" category S to accommodate nonconfigurational phrase structures.
- 2,540
3
votes
Accepted
Is v-spec Specific for agent? If so, How to Solve This Problem?
Andrew Radford (Radford 2004) discusses it on p. 351.
Go is an unaccusative verb, which means, under Radford's analysis, that the subject originates in spec-VP, unlike in the case of transitive (...
- 8,685
2
votes
Ontological status of syntactic transformations
As a minor technical correction, syntactic theories in the generative tradition do not involve transformations, they used to involve transformations, 50 years ago. Current generative syntax is very ...
- 80.3k
2
votes
Do any languages treat "locative" words as more than suffixes or prepositions?
You used nouns with locative meaning in your own examples: “top” and “side”. In English, nouns like these are used along with prepositions (“on (the) top of”, “on the side of”) but there are languages ...
- 17.4k
2
votes
Textbook: “grammar behaves as if something is left behind after movement” — How so?
I don't think the purpose of this example is to provide evidence; I think it's just to demonstrate one occurrence of this type of movement. The bolded example speaks to movement in general and holds ...
- 192
2
votes
Is Affix Hopping Still a Thing?
Chomsky’s original formulation is obsolete, if only because lexical integrity of some sort is usually assumed. But there are many languages in which suffixes or clitics are part of a constituent that ...
- 2,540
2
votes
Wh-movement Question
The original sentence for the question “Which canvas appears to have been painted with a red paint?” is “This/That canvas appears to have been painted with a red paint”, and the answer would be “This ...
- 17.6k
2
votes
Accepted
What would English sound like if the Normans were Spanish?
Assuming that those Scandinavians from Normandy in France were speakers of Spanish and not French, also that the invasion was still in 1066, English would sound more or less the same except that some ...
- 80.3k
2
votes
Does a null-subject language always have to satisfy EPP?
No. Not in the Turkish that is spoken in Istanbul. The evidence comes from scope relations when the subject is not dropped.
When you say:
Bütün çocuk-lar gel-me-di.
all kid-pl come-neg-pst
...
- 21
2
votes
Accepted
Difference between the Merge postion and the base position
Generative theories of syntax generally propose a few different "operations", which are invoked in various ways to build the tree. If you're a computationalist, you might prefer to call ...
- 62.2k
2
votes
Accepted
Why is head movement subsumed to PF operation
You are comparing apples and oranges, though at least we remain in the realm of "syntax in linguistics". The question that you are raising makes sense in the Minimalist framework – it is an ...
- 80.3k
1
vote
Why is head movement subsumed to PF operation
I am out of my depths but I think it’s something like this.
I don’t know specific examples of flat VP structure grammars but I think dependency grammars might be considered “flatter” than X-bar theory....
- 291
1
vote
Do any languages treat "locative" words as more than suffixes or prepositions?
Sure, in the Bantu languages these relationships are generally expressed through nouns rather than prepositions. (Though they're not called relational nouns like the ones brass tacks mentions, for ...
- 62.2k
1
vote
Accepted
Floating quantifiers in X-bar theory: "the men all have gone"
'The men all have a {noun}' is fine, but 'the men all have {verb}ed' is not.
The rule is probably the same one as the one that has us say 'they/we have all {verbed}' rather than 'they/we all have {...
- 126
1
vote
Allowed surface locations of [+wh] phrases apparently depend on semantics—if so, how and why?
I think you have to be more careful with the examples you're using here. Your parallelism seems odd (at least to me). There are issues of transformation (passivization), surface PP order, and argument ...
- 1,068
1
vote
Does a null-subject language always have to satisfy EPP?
EPP entails that [Spec; TP] must be filled. However, the subject can move out from [Spec; TP] to an adjunct position, leaving a trace at [Spec; TP]. An example of such a movement is topicalization, ...
- 39
1
vote
What is the difference between successive-cyclic wh-movement and long-distance wh-movement?
Well, compare TG ( Transformational Grammar) and GPSG (Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar). TG allows the formulation of rules that perform long distance movement, using the variables of a ...
- 12.4k
1
vote
What languages have extraction markers?
As I understand it, you're asking about a specific extraction marker that occurs always and only when a nominal is extracted, and in clause chains it appears in each clause. As far as I know, this ...
- 80.3k
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