The copy theory of movement

Abstract

Based on previous work by Bošković (2001, 2002, 2004a,b) and Nunes (1999, 2004), this chapter discusses a considerable amount of evidence involving A-movement, A'-movement, head movement, and remnant movement that points to the conclusion that "traces" (i.e. copies structurally lower in the syntactic representation) may be phonetically realized. In addition, the issues regarding phonetic realization of copies are shown to be determined by conditions of the phonological component and not of syntax (movement) per se. As a result, the chapter is able to explain a variety of complex phenomena that cannot be captured by trace theory. The chapter starts by reviewing several pieces of evidence that show that the phonetic realization of copies is similar to the LF interpretive procedure in the sense that it allows activation of lower copies, as well as instances of "scattered deletion", where different pieces of different chain links are realized. It is argued that convergence requirements related to linearization and morphological fusion interact with economy computations regarding applications of deletion, yielding a complex crosslinguistic pattern whereby chains in the general case have only their highest link phonetically realized, but they may also trigger pronunciation of a lower link or even pronunciation of multiple links if convergence so demands. * Previous versions of this paper were presented at the Mayfest 2002: The Minimalist Fact (University of Maryland, 5/16-18/02) and at the Workshop "The Copy Theory of Movement on the PF Side" (Universiteit Utrecht, 12/14-15/04). We are thankful to these audiences and an anonymous reviewer for their comments. Special thanks to Marcel den Dikken for his detailed comments and suggestions. Thanks also to Carol Petersen for her editorial help. During the writing of this paper, the second author received support from CNPq (grants 300897/1996-0 and 200422/04-9). On the LF side we thus have some choice in deciding where deletion should take place in nontrivial chains. By contrast, it is standardly assumed that no such choice is available in PF, the 1 From now on, copies will be annotated with superscripts. 2 Chomsky (1993) actually assumes that LF deletion in cases such as (2a) needs to leave a variable (without internal structure) behind, at least for θ-theoretic reasons. This however might become unnecessary under Bošković

Scope assignment: From <i>wh</i>- to QR

“…While there is theoretical elegance in stipulating that only the highest copy of a chain can be pronounced, or that only whole copies of a chain can be pronounced, this is empirically just not the case. Numerous examples exist that support a case for partial spell-outs of different copies, notably scattered deletion in Bulgarian and Macedonian clitic clusters (Bošković & Nunes 2007 and references cited therein); wh-copying and split constructions in German (Fanselow & Ćavar 2000), which we have used as evidence above for the spell-out of intermediate copies. There are also other phenomena that come to mind as being potential candidates for a discontinuous spell-out analysis: left branch extraction in Slavic (Bošković 2005) and split DPs in French (Butler & Mathieu 2005).…”

A Syntactic Analysis of Two Types of Predicate Reduplication in Japanese

“…In order to account for these properties, we assume that movement of an element leaves its copies behind and that these copies can be phonologically realized under certain conditions. (Chomsky (1995), Nunes (2004), Bošković & Nunes (2007)) We also follow Speas & Tenny (2003), Miyagawa (2012) and Saito (2013) in postulating a Speech Act Phrase (SAP) in the left/right periphery of clauses. Whether or not V moves to higher functional heads syntactically in Japanese has been under debate, but we assume that it does, following Otani and Whitman (1991), Koizumi (1995) and Funakoshi (2012) among others.…”

Clitic climbing (or lack thereof) and the Copy Theory of Movement

“…With the advent of the Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory (Chomsky 1995 et seq. ), Trace Theory was replaced by the Copy Theory of Movement (CTM), primarily for empirical reasons (see, e.g., Bošković & Nunes 2007). According to this proposal, movement is a composite operation that involves copying and deleting, as in (8).…”

“…A number of works have offered a host of empirical arguments from different constructions and from different languages to this effect, including cases of A-movement, A-bar movement, head movement, and remnant movement (e.g., Bobaljik 1994;2002;Pesetsky 1997;Franks 1998;Bošković 2001 et seq. ;Nunes 2004;Reglero 2004;Bošković & Nunes 2007;Kandybowicz 2008;Saab 2008;Villa-García 2013; in press; see also the collection of papers in Corver & Nunes 2007). The operation in question has been dubbed Pronounce Lower Copy (PLC) or Lower Copy Pronunciation (LCP).…”