Syntactic movement

Syntactic movement is the means by which some theories of syntax address discontinuities. Movement was first postulated by structuralist linguists who expressed it in terms of discontinuous constituents or displacement. Certain constituents appear to have been displaced from the position where they receive important features of interpretation. The concept of movement is controversial; it is associated with so-called transformational or derivational theories of syntax (e.g. transformational grammar, government and binding theory, minimalist program). Representational theories (e.g. head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar, construction grammar, and most dependency grammars), in contrast, reject the notion of movement, often addressing discontinuities in terms of feature passing or persistent structural identities instead.

Movement is the traditional "transformational" means of overcoming the discontinuities associated with wh-fronting, topicalization, extraposition, scrambling, inversion, and shifting, e.g.

The a-sentences show canonical word order, and the b-sentences illustrate the result of movement. Bold script marks the expression that is moved, and the blanks mark the positions out of which movement is assumed to have occurred. Each time, movement takes place in order to focus or emphasize the expression in bold. For instance, the constituent which story in the first b-sentence is the object of the transitive verb likes, the canonical position of an object being immediately to the right of the verb. By fronting the object as a wh-expression, it becomes the focus of communication.

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