GROUP SUMMARY : DIAGNOSING XP-M OVEMENT 1
Winfried Lechner · 2012
The present survey reviews some prominent strategies for detecting phrasal movement by the use of diagnostic tests. Just as in the sciences, applying a test requires preparation before conducting the actual experiments. In the case at hand, it is necessary to answer various questions about the entities that are suspected to have been manipulated by movement, among them: What is the base order of the expressions that the category resides in? How can the size of the moved string (feature, head, phrase) be determined? At which point in the derivation does movement apply (overt, covert, overt covert)? Does the node contain descriptive content that can be accessed by tests that evaluate interpretative properties? Which competing analytical options are available and why do they fail (binding, control, Multiple Dominance, ellipsis)? It is these and related questions that will be addressed in the first part of this contribution. The second part briefly catalogues a variety of standard tests that react to properties of dislocation. 1. Movement and diagnosis 1.1. Movement In its most general form, the term syntactic movement denotes a mapping between two distinct linguistic representations r 1 and r 2 , such that (i) r 1 includes an occurrence of a subtree α in position p 1 and (ii) r 2 includes an occurrence of α in position p 2 (where p 1 … p 2 ); and (iii) p 1 and p 2 are in a designated graph theoretic relation, usually defined in terms of the first branching node version of c-command. ‘Position of α’ is defined as ‘irreflexive mother node of α’. In r 2 , α therefore resides in the two positions p 1 and p 2 :