Basic English Grammar with Exercises

Chapter 3 - Basic Concepts of Syntactic Theory

(103) S

PP S

on the shelf 1 DP VP

Petra V'

V PP

put t 1

Similarly we might propose that some movements can move words to adjoin to
other words, as is the case of the contracted negation:

(104) I'

I

I Neg t 1

should n’t 1

The irrelevant aspects of the analysis, such as the extraction site of the negative, need
not detain us here. The important point is that the negative is moved from one position
to a site adjoined to the modal.
One might wonder if adjunction conforms to structure preservation as it does seem
to alter the structure from its D-structure condition. However, it should be noted that
adjunction does not alter lexically determined aspects of structure and so is perfectly
compliant with the Projection Principle which supersedes structural preservation.
Moreover, adjunction is something which X-bar theory allows for and hence to create
an adjunction structure is not to create something that violates the possible X-bar
nature of the structure. In this way, adjunction movement does not radically alter
structure and can be seen as structure preserving.

2.4 Locality Restrictions on movement

The restrictions on movement we have mentioned so far have concerned its structure
preserving nature. Not all structures which conform to these restrictions are
grammatical, however, indicating that other restrictions are in operation. Most of the
movements we have looked at have involved something moving within a single clause.
Passivisation, for example, moves the object of a predicate to the subject of that
predicate and obviously both the extraction site and the landing site are within the
same clause. There are movements however, that move elements from one clause to
another. Consider the following: