Towards deriving differences in how Wh Movement and QR are pronounced

Abstract

In English, Wh Movement oftentimes has the effect of letting the phrase moved be spoken in a higher position than where it originates. That position seems to get mapped onto a portion of the resulting string that is to the left of the original position. Quantifier Raising in English, by contrast, tends to require the phrase that is moved to be spoken in the position it is moved from. And when there is material that is spoken in the higher position, that material gets mapped onto a portion of the resulting string that is to the right of the lower position. I attempt to explain these differences. The explanation comes from taking the movement operation to be remerge (giving rise to multidominant phrase markers) and letting determiners spread across distant syntactic positions but get mapped onto one word.Keywords: movement, questions, quantifiers, quantifier raising, wh movement, semantics, linearization, multidominance, merge, reconstruction The ProblemMovement is a relation widely used to model certain cases of semantic displacement. In cases of constituent questions like that in (1), for example, which dish is understood to be the object of eat and we therefore expect it to fill the syntactic position that would normally follow the verb.(1) Which dish should no one eat?Movement is invoked to fulfill this expectation. It establishes a relationship between which dish and the object position by creating a silent variable in the object position and forcing which dish to bind it. A similar situation arises in (2).(2) A marble filled every hole.6 This paper started as a talk at Leiden University in March of 2010 and had a very helpful boost from the audience at the Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar at Konkuk University in August 2010. Much of the thinking was borne in seminars I gave at MIT in the Fall of 2008 and at UMass in the Fall of 2009. It owes a great deal to the audiences at these venues. And for helping me understand hard things and rescuing me from blunders, I am especially indebted to Seth Cable, Lyn Frazier, Satoshi Tomioka, Jeroen van Craenenbroeck, Paul Elbourne, David Pesetsky, Irene Heim, Lisa Matthewson, Rajesh Bhatt, Lyn Frazier and Keir Moulton. Danny Fox deserves special mention for doing all this even when I was taking potshots at his work. You and I were very lucky to have two excellent reviewers read the original submission. The paper, particularly its readability, has been vastly improved by their hard work.

Multidomination and the coherence of anaphors

“…Since there are not two copies, but only one thing, it would seem impossible to manipulate the "trace" separately from the moved constituent. And yet, here are the adjustments to the structure in (3) that Johnson (2012) suggests:…”

“…The structure she proposes for questions are parallel in every respect to the structures in Johnson (2012) as in (4) above, and with the same problems. Engdahl's solution (p. 49 ff) is parallel to Johnson's and Fox's, but resides in how rules of interpretation apply to structures.…”

Traces or Copies, or Both – Part II: Introducing Further Considerations

“…As discussed in Part I of the article, every occurrence of a determiner in lower copies of a movement chain must be replaced by the definite determiner by the application of Trace Conversion, whatever lexical item the determiner originally is. As pointed out in Johnson (2010), this aspect of Trace Conversion requires us to assume that the meaning of a copy may or may not be changed on the basis of where in the structure it is interpreted. Adopting a multidominance approach to movement, which can be seen as a different rendition of the copy theory from the one that we assume here, Johnson (2010) develops a syntactic and semantic analysis of movement and reconstruction, which does not involve this kind of process of manipulating copies.…”

Putative Null Pronominals In English: Causes and Consequences

“…Structures manufactured in this way, and, more generally, structures embodying movement dependencies, are not semantically interpretable objects, as things are. The second component comes into play to fix this problem: Trace Conversion (Fox ; see also Elbourne and Sauerland , for related ideas; cf., Johnson ). As part of the process of rendering movement dependencies semantically interpretable, lower copies of a determiner are replaced with a definite determiner, which I claim is phonologically null.…”