Chapter 3 - Basic Concepts of Syntactic Theoryobject, we should expect it to occupy the object position. The grammar that we will be
adopting in this book assumes that this is exactly the case: the interrogative pronoun
does indeed sit in the object position at some level of description of this sentence.
However, at another level of description, the interrogative pronoun is in another
position, one at the beginning of the clause. The assumption then is that this element
undergoes a movement which takes it from the object position into the sentence initial
position.
Movement processes turn out to be a central aspect of grammar in many languages
and we will see many instances of it in this book. In this section we will introduce the
main theoretical considerations relating to movement processes and which play a role
in the description of virtually all English sentences.
2.1 Move
Once the idea has been put forward that things can move about within a sentence, we
can see that it can be applied to a lot of linguistic phenomena:
(50) a the water was wasted
b is this the end?
c this conclusion, virtually no one has ever come to
d the plans were released for the new car park
In the first case in (50) we have a passive sentence in which the subject is interpreted
as the object: the water was what was wasted, not what did the wasting. We might
claim that in this case the object moves from object position into subject position:
(51) a - was wasted the water
b the water was wasted -
In (50b) we have what is termed a yes–no question, as it may be answered with a
simple “yes” or “no”. These questions typically involve subject–auxiliary inversion,
in which the auxiliary verb and the subject appear to switch places. A more current
view of the inversion process is that the auxiliary moves to a position to the left of the
subject:
(52) a - this is the end
b is this - the end
(50c) involves topicalisation, a process which moves an element interpreted as a
topic to the front of the sentence. A topic is typically something that has already been
mentioned before in a conversation, or can be interpreted as easily accessible in a
conversation due to the context. Consider the sentence in (50c), it is obvious that the
conclusion mentioned must have been a part of the preceding discussion and that it has
not just been newly introduced. We may analyse this sentence as:
(53) a - virtually no one has ever come to this conclusion
b this conclusion, virtually no one has ever come to -