Of Minds and Language (29 page)

This is what is sometimes called the “criterial” view on the assignment of scope-discourse properties. In some languages we observe that these criterial heads are phonetically realized. For instance, there are varieties of Dutch in which Q is pronounced and in many languages Topic and Focus heads are expressed by a particular piece of morphology, by a particular overt head. So I would like to make the rather familiar assumption that languages are uniform in this respect. All languages work essentially in the same way, all languages have criterial heads which carry explicit instructions to the interface systems; variation is very superficial in that, in some languages, these heads are pronounced and in others they are not (much as distinctions in Case morphology may superficially vary), but the syntax–interpretation interface functions in essentially the same way across languages.

The next question is to see how these structures can combine. Typically, these heads show up in a specific order, subject to some parametric variation, giving rise to complex configurations generated by recursive applications of Merge. These complex structures have attracted a lot of attention lately, giving rise to cartographic projects, attempts to draw maps as precise and detailed as possible of the syntactic complexity.
¹
Once we have this view of chains, we can say that the backbone of an A-bar chain of the kind discussed so far is the following, with the two special kinds of interpretively dedicated positions:

(9)    …___ X
_criterial
………___ X
_argumental
………

Then we may ask what general form chains can have: what other positions are allowed to occur in chains, on top of the two interpretively relevant positions? I think there is clear empirical evidence that argumental and criterial positions delimit chains – that is to say, there cannot be any position lower than the thematic position, nor higher than the criterial position, for principled reasons (Rizzi 2006a). On the other hand, much empirical evidence shows that there can be plenty of positions in between argumental and criterial positions: movement is local, each application of movement is limited to apply in a small portion of a syntactic tree by locality principles, so there is simply no way to guarantee that the argumental position and the criterial position will be sufficiently close to make sure that the distance can be covered by a single application of movement. A movement chain can indeed cover an unlimited structural space, as suggested by sentences like (1), but this is due to the fact that movement can apply in an indefinite number of successive steps, each of which
is local. So, the apparently unbounded nature of movement chains is in fact a consequence of the fact that movement can indefinitely reapply, ultimately a consequence of the recursive nature of Merge.

The idea that movement is inherently local is not new: it was proposed many years ago by Noam Chomsky (1973) on the basis of an argument which, initially, was largely conceptual. Island constraints had been discovered in the late sixties, so it was known that some configurations were impermeable to rules, and Ross (1967/1986) had established a catalogue of such configurations. The question Chomsky asked was: why should there be such a catalogue? His approach turned the problem around. Perhaps all cases of movement are local, and the fact that in some cases we can get an unbounded dependency may be a consequence of the fact that local movement can indefinitely reapply on its own output: certain categories have “escape hatches” so that local movement can target the “escape hatch” (typically, the complementizer system in clauses), and then undergo further movement from there to the next “escape hatch”; other categories do not have escape hatches and so we get island effects, but all instances of movement are local.

At the time, the argument looked controversial. Some syntacticians thought it was too abstract and unsubstantiated. Nevertheless, empirical evidence quickly started accumulating in favor of this view. One early kind of evidence was based on French Stylistic Inversion, where the subject appears at the very end of the structure, an option triggered by the presence of an initial wh-element, as in (10). This remained possible, as Kayne and Pollock (1978) pointed out, if that wh-element is extracted from a lower clause, as in (11):

(10)    Où est allé Jean?

           ‘Where has gone Jean?'

(11)    Où crois-tu qu'est allé Jean?

           ‘Where do you believe that has gone Jean?'

As in general the main complementizer cannot “act at a distance” triggering inversion in the embedded clause, the most reasonable analysis, Kayne and Pollock argued, is that
où
moves stepwise, first to the embedded complementizer system and then to the main clause, and it triggers Stylistic Inversion “in passing” from the embedded complementizer system.

So, according to Kayne and Pollock we may find indirect cues of the stepwise movement by observing certain operations that are plausibly triggered by
the moving element from its intermediate positions. Many other pieces of evidence of this kind have materialized since. Consider, for instance, the variety of Belfast English analyzed by Alison Henry (1995) in which sentences like the following are possible:

(12)    What did Mary claim [ ___ did [ they steal ___]]?

with the inversion taking place also in the embedded C system. The natural analysis here is that movement is stepwise and that at each step the wh-element triggers inversion, and that can go on indefinitely. Other types of evidence, which can't be discussed for reasons of time, involve purely interpretive effects. If we want to properly analyze certain phenomena of reflexive interpretation for instance, we need certain reconstruction sites, which are in fact provided by the idea that movement takes place in successive steps, or is “successive cyclic” in traditional terminology.

So we have evidence having to do with purely syntactic phenomena, and then some evidence concerning interpretive phenomena; we also have very direct evidence having to do with morphological properties. In some cases we see a special piece of morphology that somehow signals the fact that movement has taken place in successive steps. One classical case analyzed by Richard Kayne (1989) is past participle agreement in French, where we can see the participle agreeing as a function of the fact that the object has moved. A more spectacular case is the one found in Austronesian languages like Chamorro, according to Sandra Chung's (1994) analysis: each verb in the stretch from the variable to the operator carries a special agreement, which Chung calls wh-agreement, which signals the fact that movement has taken place in successive steps, through the local complementizer system. I will come back to this phenomenon later on.

Another type of evidence for successive cyclicity is even more straightforward. In some languages or varieties the wh- trace is actually pronounced in intermediate positions (wh-copying). So there are colloquial varieties of German – not of the kind that you would find in grammar books – in which the interrogative element can be replicated and pronounced twice, so a sentence like

(13)    Who do you believe she met?

will come out as something like

(14)    Wen glaubst du [wen sie getroffen hat]?

           ‘Whom do you believe whom she has met?'

with the intermediate trace pronounced (Felser 2004). This phenomenon is also found in child language. If you use the skillful techniques of elicitation introduced by Crain and Thornton (1998), and you try to have children around the
ages of 4 or 5 produce cases of wh-extraction from embedded clauses, then you will typically come up with structures of this sort. So if your target sentence is

(15)    What do you think is in the box?

some children will say something like the following:

(16)    What you think what is in the box?

essentially, with wh-reduplication. This phenomenon has been documented in the acquisition process of many languages, in child English, in child French, child German, child Dutch …and even child Basque, in work by Gutiérrez (2004):

(17)    Nor uste duzu nor bizi dela etxe horretan?

           Who think aux who lives aux house that-in

           ‘Who do you think lives in that house?'

where the wh-element
nor
gets reduplicated by the child in the embedded complementizer system.

So there is plenty of evidence that movement actually takes place in successive steps, or is successive cyclic. We should then ask the following questions: how is stepwise movement implemented? And why does movement apply stepwise?

Let us start with the
how
question. That is, what element of the formal machinery determines the possibility of successive cyclic movements? Take a case like

(18)    I wonder [what Q [you think [ ___ that [I saw ___ ]]]]?

Here the final movement to the criterial landing site is determined by the criterial Q feature, selected by the main verb
wonder
. But what about the first step, the step from the thematic position to the Spec of the embedded complementizer
that
? At least three approaches may be considered. One is that intermediate movement is untriggered, totally free, and the only requirement on a movement chain is that the final step of movement should be to a criterial position. Another view is that movement to intermediate positions is triggered by a non-specific edge-feature, so there is something like a generalized A-bar feature that says
move this element to the edge
, and then it is only in the last step that the chain acquires its flavor as a Q chain or a Topic chain, etc. A third possibility is that intermediate movement is triggered by a specific edge-feature – that is, by the formal counterpart of a criterial feature. Thus, if the construction is a question, let's say, you have a criterial, Q feature, in the final
landing site, and a formal counterpart of the Q feature in the intermediate complementizer, so that you end up with a uniform chain in that respect. The criterial and formal Q features differ only in that the criterial feature is interpretable, is visible, and triggers an explicit instruction to the interpretive systems (“my Spec is to be interpreted as an interrogative operator with scope over my complement”), whereas the formal counterpart does not carry any instruction visible to the interpretive systems, and therefore is uninterpretable.

It seems to me that some evidence in favor of this third alternative is provided by the fact that we get selective effects in the intermediate landing sites that the other approaches do not easily capture. Take for instance the inversion cases in Belfast English that we mentioned before:

(19)    What did Mary claim did they steal?

Now this inversion phenomenon in the lower complementizer is only triggered by a question, not by topicalization, etc., so that a generalized A-bar feature in the embedded C would not be sufficiently specific to account for the selectivity of the effect. And there are other pieces of evidence of the same sort supporting the view that chains are featurally uniform, and intermediate steps involve specific attracting formal features.
²

We now move to the question of
why
movement takes place in successive steps. The general answer is that it is so because there are locality principles preventing longer, unbounded steps in movement, so that long movement chains can only be built by successive steps each of which is local. But what kind of locality principles are operative? There are two fundamental concepts around. One is the concept of intervention, according to which a local relation cannot hold across an intervener of a certain kind, and the other is the concept of impenetrability, according to which certain configurations are impenetrable to local relations.

In essence, intervention principles amount to this: in a configuration like the following:

(20)    …. X…Z…Y…

no local relation can hold between X and Y across an intervening element Z, if Z is of the same structural type, given the appropriate typology of elements and positions, as X.

I have stated the idea, and will continue to illustrate it, basically in the format of relativized minimality, but there are many conceivable variants of these concepts, some of which (shortest move, minimal search, etc.) are explored in the literature (Rizzi 1990). Take a concrete example – the fact that certain elements are not extractable from indirect questions. So, for instance, if you start from something like

(21)    a. You think he behaved this way

           b. You wonder who behaved this way

it is possible to form a main question bearing on
this way
from (21a), but not from (21b):

(22)    a. How do you think he behaved ___?

           b. *How do you wonder who behaved ___?

How
can be connected to its trace in (22a), but not in (22b). In this case, the representation is the following (where “___” represents the trace of the extracted element):