Basic English Syntax with Exercises

Projection Principle

3.2.3 Traces

Obviously, this is a situation we want to avoid and so we need to strengthen the Structure Preservation principle to prevent things in a structure from being deleted willy-nilly. Suppose we assume that lexical material that enters a structure cannot be altered by a movement. This maintains the Structure Preservation principle given that the lexical items that are inserted into a structure determine that structure to a great extent through notions of projection and selection, but it also prevents the deletion of lexical information once it has been inserted into a structure. This principle is called the Projection Principle:

3.2.3 Traces

Now consider the nature of the empty object in (92b): the extraction site of the moved object. By the Projection Principle, this object position must remain in the structure and cannot be deleted otherwise the transitive verb would find itself without an object and hence would be sitting in the structural position of an intransitive verb. As this would alter the lexical nature of the verb, we conclude that it would be impossible. Yet if this position were simply vacant, like the subject position is at D-structure, we might expect that it could be the landing site for some other moved element. This, it turns out, is not true at all. Consider the following analysis which indicates several movements step by step:

3.2.3 Traces

One possible account of the nature of empty extraction sites is that they cannot act as landing sites for subsequent movements because they are occupied. As two elements cannot occupy the same position and as we are not allowed to delete material, this would block movement into this position. There are two problems that this assumption faces: what element occupies the extraction site and why cannot we see it? Given the above discussion, there is no choice as to the identity of the element that occupies this position: it must be the moved element itself. No other element could either be moved into this position or be inserted into it from elsewhere without drastically changing the lexical information represented by the D-structure and this would violate the Projection Principle. But then we seem to be forced to accept that one element can occupy two positions.

3.2.3 Traces

One might wonder if adjunction conforms to structure preservation as it does seem to alter the structure from its D-structure condition. However, it should be noted that adjunction does not alter lexically determined aspects of structure and so is perfectly compliant with the Projection Principle which supersedes structural preservation. Moreover, adjunction is something which X-bar theory allows for and hence to create an adjunction structure is not to create something that violates the possible X-bar nature of the structure. In this way, adjunction movement does not radically alter structure and can be seen as structure preserving.

5.2.3.2 Light verbs and ergatives

The analysis claims that the main verb moves to adjoin to the empty light verb. This is a perfectly possible movement given what we know about other movements. The movement is neither too far, violating bounding conditions, nor in violation of the Projection principle by changing lexically stated information. The movement is also structurally preserving in the way that adjunction is structurally preserving.

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: