Representation And Derivation In The Theory Of Grammar (studies In Natural Language And Linguistic Theory)

Derivation or Representation? Hubert Haider & Klaus Netter 1 The Issue Derivation and Representation - these keywords refer both to a conceptual as well as to an empirical issue. Transformational grammar was in its outset (Chomsky 1957, 1975) a derivational theory which characterized a well-formed sentence by its derivation, i.e. a set of syntactic representations defined by a set of rules that map one representation into another. The set of mapping­ rules, the transformations, eventually became more and more abstract and were trivialized into a single one, namely "move a" , a general movement-rule. The constraints on movement were singled out in systems of principles that ap­ ply to the resulting representations, i.e. the configurations containing a moved element and its extraction site, the trace. The introduction of trace-theory (d. Chomsky 1977, ch.3 §17, ch. 4) in principle opened up the possibility of com­ pletely abandoning movement and generating the possible outputs of movement directly, i.e. as structures that contain gaps representing the extraction sites. Derivation or Representation? Hubert Haider & Klaus Netter 1 The Issue Derivation and Representation - these keywords refer both to a conceptual as well as to an empirical issue. Transformational grammar was in its outset (Chomsky 1957, 1975) a derivational theory which characterized a well-formed sentence by its derivation, i.e. a set of syntactic representations defined by a set of rules that map one representation into another. The set of mapping rules, the transformations, eventually became more and more abstract and were trivialized into a single one, namely "move a", a general movement-rule. The constraints on movement were singled out in systems of principles that ap ply to the resulting representations, i.e. the configurations containing a moved element and its extraction site, the trace. The introduction of trace-theory (d. Chomsky 1977, ch.3 {sect}17, ch. 4) in principle opened up the possibility of com pletely abandoning movement and generating the possible outputs of movement directly, i.e. as structures that contain gaps representing the extraction sites Front Matter....Pages i-v Introduction Derivation or Representation?....Pages 1-15 NP-Movement, Crossover and Chain-Formation....Pages 17-52 NP-Movement and Expletive Chains....Pages 53-69 Chain Formation, Reanalysis, and the Economy of Levels....Pages 71-137 On Reconstruction and Coordination....Pages 139-197 An Argument for Movement....Pages 199-215 Barriers and the Theory of Binding....Pages 217-250 Levels and Empty Categories in a Principles and Parameters Approach to Parsing....Pages 251-301 Back Matter....Pages 303-320