Basic English Syntax with Exercises

Extended Projection Principle

8.2 Raising and Control

The verb seem is one which takes a clausal complement but it has no thematic subject. In this case the subject position is filled by a meaningless it, known as a pleonastic subject. This subject, like all subjects in English finite clauses is obligatory. This suggests that the obligatory nature of the subject is more than a semantic condition that arguments need to be realised. In fact there seems to be a grammatical requirement that clauses have subjects. This condition has been called the Extended Projection Principle (EPP). Recall from chapter 3 that the Projection Principle ensures that the lexical properties of heads are projected into the structure at all levels of syntactic representation. Thus if a verb requires an object as a lexical property, it must have an object at D-structure and at S-structure. The Extended Projection Principle claims not only this, but that the subject position must be present at all levels of structural representation and moreover that it must be filled by something at S-structure. Of course, under usual circumstances there will be something in the subject position at S-structure as an argument of the verb will move there for Case reasons. But even if there is no argument inside the VP in need of Case, the subject position must be filled by the insertion of a pleonastic subject:

8.2 Raising and Control

How are these clauses able to escape the EPP? Note that it would in fact be ungrammatical to fill these positions with a pleonastic subject:

8.2.1 Raising

Next, consider the restrictions on the movement shown in (52b) and (c). The subject of the embedded clause cannot undergo raising if it is in a finite clause, or in an object position. In both of these cases, the DP is sitting in a Case position, therefore regardless of any other restriction, there would be little point in it moving to the specifier of the higher clause as once it has satisfied the Case Filter, it does not need to do so again. We might assume a kind of laziness to the system (some call it ‘economy’) such that if something doesn’t need to happen, it will not happen. If the clause is finite and hence the subject gets nominative from the finite inflection, then the higher subject position will be unfilled. It is under these circumstances that the EPP will force the insertion of a pleonastic subject:

8.2.1 Raising

The grammatical (62) raises the problem of how it can be grammatical with so many clauses but only one visible subject. The EPP demands that all clauses have subjects and so we might expect that this sentence ought to be ungrammatical. All these problems can be solved if we assume that the subject does not move in one go, but moves from clause to clause, stopping off in each subject position:

8.2.1 Raising

In this way, each clause is provided with a subject, the trace, and hence the EPP can be satisfied. The ungrammaticality of (63) demonstrates that when a subject raises, it cannot actually be moved too far. Looking at what is possible and what is not possible with such movements, there is something similar about the restriction to the restriction we have noted concerning head movement. Recall that he Head Movement Constraint demands that heads do not move over the top of other heads. It appears that the restriction on subject movement is that it cannot cross over the top of another subject. A general way to express both these restrictions is to claim that a moving element cannot move over the top of a like element. This principle, known as Relativized Minimality, was introduced by Rizzi (1990) as a way of accounting for locality conditions on movement. The following diagram might help to make clear how the principle works: