Re: movement

David J. Peterson wrote:

>
> Jackson wrote:
>
> <<
> It strikes me that perhaps the original coup of generativism wasn't
> so much the conceptual framework but the theory of movement found
> in 'Syntactic Structures' - indeed, that the bravura of this
> achievement is what lent force to Chomsky's polemics.  But
> generative models do lend an intuition of the range of syntactic
> permutation available, in the sense that they render a series of
> potential landing sites for syntactic constituents and features
> which trigger movement.  One could even tweak them so as to
> construct movement not found in any natural language.  It would
> only remain to translate such rules into learner-friendly terms.
> Has anybody looked into this, or is there a general sense that
> variable word order is unwieldy?
> >>
>
> A couple things.  First of all, saying that it *is* movement is a
> theoretical claim.  In order for it to be movement, there must be
> a basic word order from which others are derived.  As far as
> I'm concerned, there's no atheoretical reason to assume that this
> is the case.
...

> Back to syntax, it may be the case that there is no basic word order
> from which all others are derived, but that there are configurations
> which are used to achieve particular meanings (for example, putting
> a verb first in English indicating a question).

Thank you for this response, it was very helpful.  It could be that a
basic word order a) doesn't exist, b) exists only as a theoretical
inevitability, insofar as it provides the most parsimonious
description of natural language syntax, c) exists in the brain, and
d) no doubt many other possibilities.  Ontological distinctions
aren't necessarily pertinent to designing new languages, but any
means of systematizing the relationship between word order and
meaning certainly is.

It seems that the underlying premise of theories of movement is that
grammatical relations are local.  The 'basic word order' is just what
there is when you rearrange the words so that any group of words
involved in a given grammatical relation is in some respect
contiguous.  If nothing else, this puts the house in order.  We can
remain skeptical about whether it is an 'underlying' order in some
nebulous cognitive sense and still use it as a 'normal form' relative
to which various other configurations can be defined.

But let me be more concrete about this notion of appropriating
movement rules to language creation with an example.  I like the idea
that questions are formed by preposing the auxiliary in English
because a non-phonetic interrogative partical occupies the
complementizer position and attracts the auxiliary in lieu of being
pronounced.  In his introductory textbook 'Minimalist Syntax', Andrew
Radford compares these examples:

Speaker A: What did you want to ask me?
Speaker B: If you will marry me.

Speaker A: What did you want to ask me?
Speaker B: Will you marry me?

In the second case, a null interrogative complementizer is said to
take the place of "If", and express itself by sucking the auxiliary
up.  In designing a language, one could systematize the relationship
between word order and grammatical meaning by defining such particles
alongside pronounced lexemes.

Best,
Jackson

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