Basic English Grammar with Exercises

Theoretical Aspects of Movement

Finally in (50d) we see another kind of movement which appears to split a
constituent across the structure. The preposition phrase for the new car park, is clearly
related to the noun plans. Indeed, this PP is the complement of the noun:

(54) the plans for the new car park

However, the PP appears to have been moved out of the subject DP into the
sentence final position. This process is known as extraposition:

(55) a the plans for the new car park were released –

b the plans – were released for the new car park

As we saw in the previous section grammatical processes should be stated as
simply and generally as possible if we are to provide a theory that can cover the basic
fact of language learnability. This would argue against an approach to movement in
which we provide many movement rules designed to capture the specific facts about
individual movements. Instead we should follow the example of the previous section
and provide a small number of general rules which have a wide applicability.
In fact the general assumption is that there is just one movement rule, usually
called Move  which can be stated as:

(56) Move

Move anything anywhere.

This might not seem a very wise kind of rule to allow in a grammar as it would seem
to sanction complete chaos and English does not appear to be anything near chaotic in
its grammatical organisation.
The rule in (56) indeed would sanction chaos if this were all there was to say about
movement. However there is a good deal more to be said. Let us take X-bar structures
into consideration. When an object moves to subject position in a passive construction
it is moving from one DP position to another: complement of the verb to specifier
position. Simplifying somewhat, we might suppose the following analysis:

(57) VP

DP V'

the water V VP

was DP V'

• V

wasted

Here the main verb wasted takes its argument in the specifier position of its own
phrase. This phrase is in turn the complement of the auxiliary verb was. The argument
moves from the specifier of the lower verb to that of the higher one.