Re: The opposite of resumptive

Eldin Raigmore, On 16/06/2006 22:52:
> In the book "Word Order and Word Order Change", edited by Charles N. Li, is
> an article "The Presentative Movement, or Why the Ideal Word Order is
> V.S.O.P.", by Robert Hetzron.
>
> Hetzron's data is that in several languages the part of the sentence which,
> in the speaker's possibly vague opinion, the addresse most needs to
> remember in order to understand the anticipated subsequent discourse, will
> be "moved" to the end of the sentence.  Conversely, if that "presentative
> movement" doesn't interfere, the part of the sentence which the speaker
> believes is needed to "fill in the gaps" in the previous part of the
> discourse will be moved to the beginning of the sentence.
>
> (And Rosta says this doesn't happen, but he admits he knows for sure only
> about English.)
Specifically, I have been told by people less ignorant than me that in no language is there
rightwards wh-movement (i.e. the sort of process that moves an element, such as
a wh-word, an indefinitely long distance (especially, out of indefinitely many
clauses) towards the root of the tree).

--And.