3.2.1 Move α

Once the idea has been put forward that things can move about within a sentence, we can see that it can be applied to a lot of linguistic phenomena:

In the first case in (50) we have a passive sentence in which the subject is interpreted as the object: the water was what was wasted, not what did the wasting. We might claim that in this case the object moves from object position into subject position:

In (50b) we have what is termed a yes–no question, as it may be answered with a simple “yes” or “no”. These questions typically involve subject–auxiliary inversion, in which the auxiliary verb and the subject appear to switch places. A more current view of the inversion process is that the auxiliary moves to a position to the left of the subject:

(50c) involves topicalisation, a process which moves an element interpreted as a topic to the front of the sentence. A topic is typically something that has already been mentioned before in a conversation, or can be interpreted as easily accessible in a conversation due to the context. Consider the sentence in (50c), it is obvious that the conclusion mentioned must have been a part of the preceding discussion and that it has not just been newly introduced. We may analyse this sentence as:

Finally in (50d) we see another kind of movement which appears to split a constituent across the structure. The preposition phrase for the new car park, is clearly related to the noun plans. Indeed, this PP is the complement of the noun:

However, the PP appears to have been moved out of the subject DP into the sentence final position. This process is known as extraposition:

As we saw in the previous section grammatical processes should be stated as simply and generally as possible if we are to provide a theory that can cover the basic fact of language learnability. This would argue against an approach to movement in which we provide many movement rules designed to capture the specific facts about individual movements. Instead we should follow the example of the previous section and provide a small number of general rules which have a wide applicability.

In fact the general assumption is that there is just one movement rule, usually called Move α which can be stated as:

This might not seem a very wise kind of rule to allow in a grammar as it would seem to sanction complete chaos and English does not appear to be anything near chaotic in its grammatical organisation.

The rule in (56) indeed would sanction chaos if this were all there was to say about movement. However there is a good deal more to be said. Let us take X-bar structures into consideration. When an object moves to subject position in a passive construction it is moving from one DP position to another: complement of the verb to specifier position. Simplifying somewhat, we might suppose the following analysis:

Here the main verb wasted takes its argument in the specifier position of its own phrase. This phrase is in turn the complement of the auxiliary verb was. The argument moves from the specifier of the lower verb to that of the higher one.

The structure we end up with is one that is perfectly compatible with X-bar principles. In other words, the movement seems not to have radically altered the structure. Suppose we assume a restriction on all movements, that they cannot alter structures in a way that would violate basic X-bar principles:

This would rule out immediately a very large class of movements possible under the assumption of (56).

The important point to recognise is that the assumption of (56) and the imposition of a restriction such as (58) offer a far simpler and general theory of what can move where than would a theory that was made up of lots of specific rules telling us what can move where and under what conditions in particular cases. Of course, (56) and (58) together still do not constitute a particularly accurate theory of movement and there are still many movements allowed under these assumptions that do not actually occur. However, even if we add five or ten more restrictions of the kind in (58) we would still have a more general theory of movement than the literally hundreds of movement rules that would be required to describe specific cases of movements. We will see that the number of restrictions required to capture the majority of facts about movement is surprisingly small.