Provocative Syntax (Volume 61) (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs (61))

Chomsky showed that no description of natural language syntax would be adequate without some notion of movement operations in a syntactic derivation. It now seems likely that such movement transformations are formally simple operations, in which a single phrase is displaced from its original position within a phrase marker, but after more than fifty years of generative theorizing, the mechanics of syntactic movement are still murky and controversial. In Provocative Syntax, Phil Branigan examines the forces that drive syntactic movement and offers a new synthetic model of the basic movement operation by reassembling in a novel way isolated ideas that have been suggested elsewhere in the literature. The unifying concept is the operation of provocation, which occurs in the course of feature valuation when certain probes seek a value for their unvalued features by identifying a goal. Provocation forces the generation of a copy of the goal; the copy originates outside the original phrase marker and must then be introduced into it. In this approach, movement is not forced by the need for extra positions; extra positions are generated because movement is taking place. After presenting the central proposal and showing its implementation in the analyses of various familiar cases of syntactic movement, Branigan demonstrates the effects of provocation in a variety of inversion constructions, examines interactions between head and phrasal provocation within the "left periphery" of Germanic embedded clauses, and describes the details of chain formation and successive cyclic movement in a provocation model. A new theory of syntactic movement within a Chomskyan framework. Chomsky showed that no description of natural language syntax would be adequate without some notion of movement operations in a syntactic derivation. It now seems likely that such movement transformations are formally simple operations, in which a single phrase is displaced from its original position within a phrase marker, but after more than fifty years of generative theorizing, the mechanics of syntactic movement are still murky and controversial. In Provocative Syntax , Phil Branigan examines the forces that drive syntactic movement and offers a new synthetic model of the basic movement operation by reassembling in a novel way isolated ideas that have been suggested elsewhere in the literature. The unifying concept is the operation of provocation, which occurs in the course of feature valuation when certain probes seek a value for their unvalued features by identifying a goal. Provocation forces the generation of a copy of the goal; the copy originates outside the original phrase marker and must then be introduced into it. In this approach, movement is not forced by the need for extra positions; extra positions are generated because movement is taking place. After presenting the central proposal and showing its implementation in the analyses of various familiar cases of syntactic movement, Branigan demonstrates the effects of provocation in a variety of inversion constructions, examines interactions between head and phrasal provocation within the left periphery of Germanic embedded clauses, and describes the details of chain formation and successive cyclic movement in a provocation model. Provocation. Introduction -- The Inner Workings Of Provocation -- Virtues Of Provocation -- Clausal Provocation -- Chain Formation -- Provoking Head Movement -- Provocative Case Studies. Quotative Inversion -- Negative Inversion -- Germanic Verb-second Clauses -- Force And Provocation. Evidence For Fin-to-force Movement -- On Wh-movement -- The Distribution Of Embedded-verb Second Clauses -- Appendix: Selection Of Clausal Complements -- Provoking Trace Deletion. Introduction -- That-trace Effects -- Crosslinguistic Variation -- A Spooky Constraint -- Short Wh-movement In Embedded Questions. Phil Branigan. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. Contents......Page 6 Series Foreword......Page 8 Preface......Page 10 1 Introduction......Page 12 2 Provocation......Page 18 3 Provocative Case Studies......Page 52 4 Force and Provocation......Page 74 5 Provoking Trace Deletion......Page 130 Notes......Page 166 References......Page 176 Index......Page 186