Basic English Syntax with Exercises

landing site

3.2.3 Traces

In the previous sections of this chapter we have concerned ourselves with the positions in which elements originate at D-structure and the positions they move to at S-structure. We might term these positions the Extraction site and the Landing site of a moved element. What is the status of the landing site at D-structure and the extraction site at S-structure? In (58) we introduced a restriction on movement called the Structure Preservation principle, which states that movements are not allowed to alter the basic X-bar nature of a structure. The result of this restriction is that the structure cannot be much different between D- and S-structure. In particular, we would not expect landing and extraction sites to appear at one level of representation but be absent at another. Thus, if we consider a passive structure in which the object moves to subject position, we can expect the object and subject positions to be present at both D- and S-structure:

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

There is one more point we need to make in connection with positions involved in movement. Above we said that the landing site for a moved object in a passive structure is an empty position: the subject. This seems to make sense given that the subject position is an integral part of the sentence, without which we would not have a complete sentence. However, it is not always easy to identify a landing site as something that exists before the movement takes place. For example, consider the case of PP preposing, in which a PP is moved to the front of the clause:

3.2.4 Locality Restrictions on movement

The restrictions on movement we have mentioned so far have concerned its structure preserving nature. Not all structures which conform to these restrictions are grammatical, however, indicating that other restrictions are in operation. Most of the movements we have looked at have involved something moving within a single clause. Passivisation, for example, moves the object of a predicate to the subject of that predicate and obviously both the extraction site and the landing site are within the same clause. There are movements however, that move elements from one clause to another. Consider the following:

6.3 Movement to Spec IP

Let us now turn to the landing site of the movement. The subject moves to a position to the left of a modal and so the obvious place to assume as its landing site is the specifier of IP:

6.3 Movement to Spec IP

This must be a Case position as the sentence is grammatical with the subject sitting in it and therefore the Case Filter must be satisfied. If we assume that it is the inflection which is responsible for assigning the Case we account for why this is the landing site for this movement. Moreover, we also account for the difference between the subjects of finite and infinite clauses. Recall that while the subject of the finite clause has nominative Case, the typical Case for the subject of the non-finite clause is accusative:

7.5.3 Negative fronting

This complementary distribution seems more significant than that which holds between the focus and the wh-element as both the focus and the fronted negative clearly occupy very similar positions. We might therefore claim that both make use of the same landing site: specifier of iP.

8.2.1 Raising

In this example, the subject starts off in the lowest clause as the subject of the adjective skilled. It then moves out of three clauses to the subject position of the raising verb. In principle, then, it might appear that there is no limit to how far a subject may raise. However, it is interesting that in order for this to happen, each predicate between the original clause and the final landing site of the raised subject must be either a raising predicate or a passive verb and moreover each intervening clause must be non-finite and have a vacant subject position. If any of these conditions is not upheld, the sentence is ungrammatical: