Movement's just another word for nothing left to merge

[Borsley R D]

There are some cases in English where a gap of a certain kind is possible
but not an overt constituent. For example:

What he may do ___ is go home.
*He may do go home.
What he is doing ___ is going home.
*He is doing going home.
No matter how clever the students (are) ___, ...
The students *(are) very clever.

These look like a problem for the copy theory of movement.

Bob


Prof. Robert D. Borsley
Department of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
COLCHESTER CO4 3SQ, UK

rborsley at essex.ac.uk
tel: +44 1206 873762
fax: +44 1206 872198
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~rborsley

On Tue, 31 May 2005, Tibor Kiss wrote:

> Hi,
>
> some of you might surely be aware that Chomsky has recently proposed (i.a.
> in 2005-LI) that move is in fact just a kind of merge, where you merge an
> item that has already been merged. Now the copy theory of movement boils
> down to the idea that only the highest c-commanding phrase is not deleted
> phonologically. Together this means that the current theory of movement in
> MP is almost identical to SLASH propagation in GPSG/HPSG, the difference
> being that the phonology of the trace is absent from the beginning and that
> the MP allows intermediate copies.
>
> One crucial idea within HPSG was that not all information is available in
> the trace-filler relation, but only LOCAL information. If this idea yields
> empirical predictions (I don’t remember), it could be used as a weapon
> against the full-identity copy theory of the MP.
>
> Do I would like to ask: Do we find empirical consequences of the idea that
> SLASH only carries LOCAL information?
>
> Thanks,
>
> T. (not A.)
>
>
> ------------------------------------------
> Prof. Dr. Tibor Kiss
> Sprachwissenschaftliches Institut - Ruhr-Universität Bochum
> +49-234-3225114 // +49-177-7468265
>
>
>
>