2.3.2 Movement

This sentence is no longer ambiguous between the two meanings. This is because we must interpret the moved element as a single constituent and not as two separate constituents that have been moved together. The same point can be made with the movement of wh-elements, as shown by the following:

7.3.2 Wh-movement

7.3.4 The interaction between wh-movement and inversion

7.4.2 A comparison between relative and interrogative clauses

However, if we take one step back from the details, we can see some striking similarities between the reasons for wh-movement in both types of clauses. For one thing, both movements have semantic rather than grammatical motivations. Moreover, the reason why the wh-element moves in an interrogative is to enable the CP to be interpreted as a question. The reason why the wh-element moves in a relative clause is to enable the CP to be interpreted as a modifier.

7.5.1 Topicalisation

One observation that links all these structures (including those with an initial adverb) is that they are all pronounced with a pause after the initial phrase. This is unlike the wh-element in spec CP, which has no pause after it. This might indicate, that they are not in the same positions. Another observation that indicates a difference between topicalisation and wh-movement is that there is never inversion with topicalisation:

7.5.3 Negative fronting

This kind of movement is even more like wh-movement than the other two we have looked at as it is accompanied by an inverted auxiliary, which topicalisation and focus fronting are not. We might be tempted, therefore to propose that negative fronting moves the negative element in to the specifier of CP. Unfortunately, the following datum questions this assumption:

7.5.3 Negative fronting

The difference however, between the fronted focus and the fronted negative is that the latter induces inversion to ‘i’, while the former does not. Referring back to the difference between wh-movement that triggers inversion and wh-movement that does not, we proposed that inversion is triggered when there is no head to agree with. In embedded interrogatives the complementiser position could be filled and hence there will be no inversion. If we project these ideas on to the current situation, we conclude that with focus the i head is filled by some abstract element but with negative fronting the head position is unfilled. We know that the negative head is a verbal element of the category ‘v’ and so it cannot be generated directly in i. The only way for the negative head to get to i is for it to move and yet we know that the negative is not able to move to I to support the inflection in English, as it is in Finnish. Thus, there is no way for the negative head to get to i and hence when a negative element moves to the specifier of iP it will induce inversion to provide a head for it.

7.6 Conclusion

In this chapter we have introduced the final part of the clause structure of the English sentence. This part of the structure, built on top of the IP serves a number of purposes, but collectively seems to be to do with the syntactic arrangement of operators of one type or another. With wh-movement, both in interrogative clauses and relative clauses, the wh-element is an operator with either quantifier-like or anaphoric function. The interpretation of this element is dependent on movement which has a dual role, both to mark the clause as having a special interpretation (as an interrogative or relative) and to establish a relationship between that interpretation and a position in the clause itself. Hence, questions can be seen to be ‘about’ the subject or the clause, etc. and relatives can relate the modified noun to the object of the clause, etc. Focus and negative fronting may also have a similar function in that their interpretation is quantifier-like. Topicalisation, although not quantificational, may be seen as anaphoric in that the topic refers to some element established in the discourse.