3.2.3 Traces

4.1 Why the Noun is not the Head of the DP

There is a way to solve the problem, either way, which involves a slightly more abstract analysis. Suppose the phrases in question do have heads, but they are unpronounced. The idea of an unpronounced, phonologically ‘empty’ element has been made use of several times already in this book. For example as the understood subject of an imperative or as the trace left behind by a movement. So the idea is not without precedence. Making use of this idea, we have two opposing analyses:

4.1 Why the Noun is not the Head of the DP

Of course, the assumption of an empty category must have other motivations than just their necessity to make the analysis work. With the empty subject of an imperative we pointed out that this could act as the antecedent of a reflexive pronoun and with the trace we demonstrated how this prevents other elements from moving into a position vacated by another moved element. Is there any independent justification for either of the empty heads in (27) or (28)? If we consider the empty noun in (28), the only justification this has is to provide a head for the NP. The entire semantic content and the grammatical features of the phrase are contributed by the pronoun itself: the NP is third person singular because the pronoun is third person singular and the NP has a reference which is determined by the pronoun. Thus there is no independent support for the existence of this empty noun.

7.3.4 The interaction between wh-movement and inversion

But if whether is not a complementiser, what is it? It differs in one very large way from wh-elements and that is while wh-elements move out of a clause whether does not seem to. Wh-elements are all moved to the spec CP from some position inside the IP and therefore they are always associated with a ‘gap’ in the clause, filled, of course, by a trace:

7.4.2 A comparison between relative and interrogative clauses

The wh-relative resembles an interrogative in more than just the fact that it is introduced by a wh-element, but also in the process which apparently forms the two structures. In both cases, the wh-element starts off inside the clause and moves to the specifier of CP. Thus, both types of clauses start with a wh-element and have a corresponding ‘gap’ in the position it was moved from. The gap contains the trace of the moved wh-element:

8.2 Raising and Control

Of course, the fact that the dependent missing subject shares a Θ-role with its antecedent can lead to only one conclusion, given the theory of Θ-role assignment discussed in chapter 2: the missing subject and its antecedent are a single argument. In other words, this kind of phenomenon is the result of movement and the missing subject is a trace:

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: