Subject: _ rightward movement _ review - - i

[ editor 's note : this is part one of a two part review . the second part appears in the next issue of linguist ] beerman , dorothee , david leblanc , & henk van riemsdijk , eds . ( 1997 ) rightward movement ( linguistik aktuell 17 ) amsterdam : benjamins . 406 pp . this is a proceedings volume collecting together papers presented in oct . 1995 at the tilburg conference on rightward movement . the editors mention two or three papers that were presented at the conference but were not including in this proceedings volume . i say ` two or three ' because , although they mention three authors ( kayne , koike , and truckenbrodt ) , koike actually has a paper in this volume ; i do not know why his name is included in the list of authors whose papers were not included . at the back of the book , a complete list of addresses ( snail - and e-mail ) of the contributors is included . the editors ' preface ( with van riemsdijk named as principal author ) provides a very nice summary of the relevant issues and their background in the literature . special note is taken of repercussions of recent work in minimalist program ( e . g . , kayne 1994 ) for the whole notion of ` rightward movement ' ( hereafter rm ) . this reviewer would note in particular that , although it is commonly supposed that , as stated in the preface , ` in a minimalist approach , movement is exclusively triggered by checking . . . . given this new line of thinking , rightward movement simply cannot be triggered , hence it cannot exist ' , some of the contributors - - e . g . , alphonce & davis , buring & hartmann - - demonstrate that it is in fact possible to develop hypotheses within the minimalist framework that would enable triggering of such movement . of the 14 papers in the collection , it is hardly surprising that 7 deal with ` extraposition ' ( defined in various ways ) , and four of those are concerned primarily with one aspect or other of extraposition in german . i will discuss these extraposition papers as a group before considering the others . josef bayer 's paper ` cp - extraposition as argument shift ' ( pp . 37-58 ) begins with a very nice , neat summary of problems with classical extraposition account ( via rm ) for postverbal cps in v - final languages ( focussing particularly on bengali , hindi , and german ) , noting that these problems disappear under a kayne - type analysis . however , he goes on to note definite empirical problems with a kayne - type analysis . he then proposes an analysis according to which a complement is right-adjoined to the maximal projection of its governing head ( in this case vp ) , leaving behind a trace as sole sister of that head ( v ) . if that trace is then deleted and the tree is pruned , the v ends up with a complement to its right which it can theta-mark . alternatively , bayer suggests , at least some ` extraposed ' cps may be base-generated to the right , co-indexed with a ( dummy / deletable ) pronominal , by inheritance from which they are licensed . bayer notes that this would help account for the fact that in some ov languages ( e . g . , bengali ) , certain classes of cps are * always * ` extraposed ' . if we assume that directionality is relevant to selection , then the resulting vp constitutes a barrier to a cp on the ` non-canonical ' side of the head , which would account for the scope effects bayer notes earlier as being problematic for both the traditional account and the kayne - type account . in ` rightward scrambling ' ( pp . 186-214 ) , anoop mahajan argues on the basis of various relations sensitive to c-command that postverbal nominal arguments in hindi are merely constituents left behind while everything else has moved leftwards . this analysis supersedes the rm analysis he proposed in an unpublished paper ten years ago and is deliberately consistent with an analysis based on kayne 's linear correspondence axiom ( hereafter lca ) . this reviewer notes that many of mahajan 's arguments necessarily presuppose certain possibly dubious tacit assumptions , e . g . , that rm must necessarily involve adjunction specifically to ip ( contrary to the approach proposed in , e . g . , muller 's , wiltschko 's , and rochemont & culicover 's papers ) . for instance , the string in mahajan 's ( 33 ) , which he marks ( ? ? ? ) could be generated - - and its unacceptability accounted for - - by right-adjunction of the direct object to vp rather than ip . nowhere does mahajan actually address what in this reviewer 's opinion is the most basic issue with questions like this : is there or is there not any evidence of a * gap * corresponding to the postverbal material ? michael s . rochemont & peter w . culicover in ` deriving dependent right adjuncts in english ' ( pp . 279-300 ) discuss various constructions in english , all of which might be included under a rather broadly-defined concept of ` extraposition ' . distinguishing between the extraposition of relative clauses on the one hand and heavy - np shift and presentational - there insertion on the other , they argue that relative - clause extraposition is best treated as ( 1 ) base - generated and ( 2 ) right-adjunction to the governing category ( vp , ip , or cp ) of the antecedent to the extraposed rc . they make an effort to conjure up plausible analyses of rc - extraposition involving kayne - style leftward-movement but note that none of the possibilities they consider are quite satisfactory . even the ` best ' option , involving movement of both the rc and its antecedent to distinct spec positions , fails to provide any motivation for either the posited movement or the highly ramified structure such an analysis requires . expanding on earlier work of their own ( rochemont & culicover 1990 ) , rochemont & culicover argue that heavy - np shift and presentational - there insertion are best treated as instances of movement to a right - adjoined a ' - position . they demonstrate that , quite apart from the problems discussed in rochemont & culicover 1990 , any attempt to analyze such constructions by means of exclusively leftward movement involves the extremely unattractive movement of what is not , in fact , by any stretch of the imagination a recognizable constituent . in the end , they acknowledge that there are some empirical problems shared by both the rightward-movement account they apparently prefer and the ` movement to high specifier ' account that would be more consistent with a kayne - type approach , but that the latter raises some provoking theoretical problems that are absent from their rightward-movement account . they conclude by saying that ` the question whether rightward movement exists or not . . . is not an empirical one . ' daniel buring & katharina hartmann 's paper ` the kayne mutiny ' ( pp . 59-80 ) presents an excellent argument for the empirical bankruptcy of the kayne antisymmetry hypothesis . making crucial use of reconstruction at lf and of binding - theoretic statements referring to ( undeleted ) traces , b&h 's argument is built upon the prediction that , if extraposition is a consequence of rm , it ought to be possible for a proper binding relation * not * to exist between an np and a cp later in the sentence - - if the np happens to be in a hierarchically lower position , from which neither it nor any of its daughters is able to c-command the cp ( such a lack of binding relation is a priori impossible in a kayne analysis , according to which any np to the left of a cp must ipso facto c-command it ) . they then demonstrate that such binding failures are in fact attested , and are indeed not all that difficult to come up with in a language like german . ( at the end of section 2 , they acknowledge some confusing results with regard to coreference options , concluding that these ` require further investigation ' . ) they further demonstrate ( section 3 ) that the kayne analysis actually does serious violence to many standard assumptions about movement , including ( similarly to rochemont & culicover ) issues of what qualifies as a ( movable ) constituent and under what circumstances a constituent may be ` stranded ' . ( it 's from this surreptitiously iconoclastic character of kayne 's hypothesis that they get their clever title . ) and they demonstrate that verb - topicalization ought to be impossible in a kayne analysis , although of course it 's quite common in german . in order to account for the complications with regard to island - constraint violations , etc . that have presented problems for earlier versions of a rm - analysis of extraposition in german and similar languages , b&h propose ( p . 72 ) a generalization according to which finite clauses may never be governed by either v or i . this provides an actual motivation for cp - extraposition , since presumably in its ds position a complement clause is governed by the matrix verb , and in order to escape that government must be right-adjoined to some higher phrasal node , presumably ip . this is in direct conflict with bayer 's analysis , according to which the extraposed cp ends up being governed by the matrix verb as a result of the deletion of its own trace and tree-pruning ; which analysis is to be preferred ought to be an empirical problem . hubert haider 's paper ` extraposition ' ( 115-152 ) argues on the basis of the extraposition of comparatives and the c-command relations essential thereto in english and german ( mostly german ) that extraposed constituents remain embedded in their ds mothers . haider further argues that extraposed relative and argument clauses must also be vp - internal , since although they are n't subject to the same c-command relations themselves , they always come * before * extraposed comparatives which are . broadening his scope in section 2 to other examples of german extraposition , haider demonstrates that they can't result from movement and must therefore be base-generated . but , on the basis of scope , c-command , and absence of island-effects , he also argues against an analysis in terms of base-generated adjunction . haider agrees with kayne in assuming exclusive leftward movement ; however , he allows for either head-initial or head-final base structures , and invokes head movement while kayne invokes phrasal movement . haider presents several predictions that kayne 's lca theory would have for a language such as german , which he then demonstrates are all falsified by the actual data : ( 1 ) phrases to the left of the verb should be in spec - positions , and should therefore be islands ( 2 ) vp - adverbials and predicates should end up in postverbal position , since there 's nothing to trigger their movement ( 3 ) vp - topicalization ought to involve the movement of a functional projection containing a trace of the finite verb . in ` extraposition as remnant movement ' ( p . 215-246 ) , gereon muller offers a very neat analysis of extraposition in german as right - adjunction to a variety of phrasal nodes , including cp as well as vp or ip , thereby accounting for various otherwise problematic details with regard to island effects in both leftward - and rightward-moved constituents . the paper includes a very interesting and useful comparative discussion of the adequacy of a variety of different proposed constraints for excluding unacceptable strings while allowing acceptable ones . martina wiltschko 's paper , ` extraposition , identification and precedence ' ( pp . 358-396 ) , a summary of her 1995 wien dissertation , discusses extraposition in german , focussing on the relation of * identification * between the ` identifyee ' , the ( pro ) nominal element ( np or dp ) in the canonical position within the clause and the ` identifier ' , the extraposed constituent . both identifyee and identifier provide linguistically necessary information : the identifyee occupies a canonical ( theta - ) position , therefore satisfying syntactic requirements , while the identifier provides necessary semantic content to licence the identifyee 's definiteness . given that the identifyee * introduces * a discourse referent , it must ( on the basis of heim 's ( 1980 ) novelty condition ) precede the identifier . wiltschko also argues for a locality constraint on identification , according to which the identifier must c-command the identifyee , without any intervening xp ; thus , the identifier must be right-adjoined to the minimal maximal projection dominating the identifyee . in wiltschko 's view , these two constraints together account for the fact that identifiers are always extraposed . she acknowledges that this analysis apply only to * restrictive relative clauses * , not to other types of modifiers . attractive as the paper is in many ways , it suffers somewhat from the necessary exclusion of many supporting arguments , for which the interested reader is referred to the full-length dissertation . two of the papers are concerned primarily with parsing theory and the development of adequate parsing technology . both of these papers , coming from different points of view , argue for a data-driven , bottom-up parsing strategy as against a hypothesis-driven top-down strategy . in ` on movement and one - pass no backtrack parsing ' ( pp . 301-330 ) , chris sijtsma recognizes that ` natural ' ( i . e . , single-pass , no backtracking , faithful to derivation ) bottom-up parsers are less restrictive than natural top-down parsers , which of course from the point of view of strict generative theory is a point against them , but assumes that there is enough variation among actual languages that a bottom-up parsing strategy is to be preferred . this reviewer finds such a conclusion attractive , but worries that sijtsma has provided so little in the way of empirical demonstration to back it up ; indeed , for such a mathematically-oriented paper ( at least relative to this reviewer 's experience ) , there is extremely little in the way of solid argument presented ; most of the time , sijtsma merely asserts that the proof of any given theorem is either self-evident or readily derivable ; in a few cases , he refers to demonstrations elsewhere in the literature . another issue both of these papers consider very seriously , without , however , either of them coming up with a very satisfactory solution , is the proper size of the look - ahead window for an adequate parser . sijtsma asserts ( pp . 305 - 6 ) that any grammar with a look-ahead window greater than 1 is functionally equivalent to a grammar that looks ahead just one symbol , but then goes on to say , ` in practice we still need . . . parsers that look ahead more than one symbol . ' in subsequent discussion it becomes clear that he is unclear just how large a look - ahead window is empirically adequate . likewise , alphonce & davis , while currently working with a look-ahead window of ` at most two chunks ' ( p . 25 ) , are clearly dissatisfied with this characterization . it is clear that this issue needs more thought , if not further research , devoted to it . a fundamental claim of the paper by carl alphonce & henry davis , ` motivating non - directional movement ' ( pp . 7-36 ) , is that linear precedence constraints , indeed lp phenomena of any kind , have no relevance for syntax at all ; essentially , they claim that , from the point of view of all syntactic levels including lf , constituents are organized hierarchically in terms of dominance relations but not linearly in terms of precedence relations . in alphonce & davis ' view , all precedence relations are imposed at pf , making them essentially matters of performance rather than competence . in the opinion of this reviewer , this is a very interesting and possibly attractive idea . unfortunately , contrary to the promise contained in the abstract , this claim is not so much argued for as assumed within the paper . nor is it made clear - - to this reviewer , anyway - - that it is explicitly argued for anywhere else , unlike the skipped arguments behind wiltschko 's paper and the citations given in sijtsma 's paper . alphonce & davis merely demonstrate that it is possible to develop an analytic approach - - more precisely , a parsing program - - that has no need for any kind of explicit syntactic constraints , at any level ( whether ug or language-particular ) , making reference to linear order . at the end of their abstract , alphonce & davis claim that they are motivated by a conviction that ` it is a priori desirable to eliminate as much redundancy as possible between different components of the system . . . . if some phenomena has [ sic ] an independent processing explanation we hold that syntactic theory should not have to offer any explanation for it . ' this approach is all very well in a purely formal mathematical system , but it is fairly common knowledge that redundancy is in fact a sine qua non of biological systems ( cf . e . g . gould 1993 ) and of natural-linguistic systems as well ( cf . e . g . hock 1986 , ch . 9 & 12 ; this fact is also acknowledged by chris sijtsma in his paper , p . 314 ) . the mere fact that one can develop a parsing program that has no need to appeal to syntactic lp constraints , therefore , in no way demonstrates that such constraints have no place in human natural-language competence . much of sijtsma 's paper is devoted to developing points ( regarding , e . g . , the proper type ( s ) and subcategorization frame ( s ) of pps ) that are clearly relevant to his primary concern , which is developing an adequate automated parsing grammar , but are tangential to the focus of the collection . in arguing , contrary to kayne , that ug does not stipulate one universal tree-structure for all languages , sijtsma gets a fair amount of mileage out of replacing the assumption that node-labels are atomic with the assumption that they are merely shorthand for feature-bundles . though he does n't mention this , this replacement has actually been implicit in x - bar theory ever since the early 70 's . with regard to directionality of movement , sijtsma argues that rightward movement must be allowed by ug , with this caveat : in deriving ss from ds , leftward movement is unrestricted but rightward movement of modifiers ( which do n't leave obvious gaps ) should not exceed the look-ahead buffer ; on the other hand , in deriving lf from ss rightward movement is unrestricted but leftward [ editor 's note : this review is continued in the next issue of linguist ] - steven schaufele , ph . d . , asst . prof . of linguistics , english department soochow university , waishuanghsi campus , taipei 11102 , taiwan , roc ( 886 ) ( 02 ) 2881-9471 ext . 6504 fcosw5 @ mbm1 . scu . edu . tw http : / / www . prairienet . org / ~ fcosws / homepage . html * * * o syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum ! * * * * * * nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis ! * * *
