A-movement Summary

We have primarily been concerned with the syntax of subjects. We argued that Belfast English structures such as There should some students get distinctions provide us with evidence that subjects originate internally within VP, and we noted that the claim that subjects originate internally within VP is known as the VP-Internal Subject Hypothesis/VPISH. We also maintained that sentences such as Some students should get distinctions involve movement of some students from the specifier position within VP to the specifier position within TP, and we noted that the relevant movement operation is known as A-movement. We claimed that the syntax of quotative structures like ‘It wasn’t me’, said Mary provides support for VPISH, if Mary remains in situ in the specifier position within VP. We suggested that idioms like All hell will break loose provide further empirical support for the VPISH, since the assumption that idioms are unitary constituents requires us to suppose that all hell originates as the subject of break loose (in the specifier position within VP) and from there is raised up (by application of A-movement) to become the subject/specifier of the TP headed by will. We argued that the VP-Internal Subject Hypothesis allows us to posit a uniform mapping between (semantic) argument structure and (initial) syntactic structure, if we suppose that all arguments of a predicate originate internally within a projection of the predicate. It then follows that in a sentence such as The police have arrested the suspect, the predicate arrested is merged with its internal argument (= complement) the suspect to form the V-bar arrested the subject, and then the resulting structure is merged with the external argument (= subject) of arrested to form the VP the police arrested the suspect. Because finite auxiliaries have an [EPP] feature requiring them to project a specifier, the subject the police then moves (via A-movement) from spec-VP to spec-TP, thereby becoming the subject of have. We saw that different arguments play different semantic roles with respect to their predicates, and that these have traditionally been described in terms of a set of thematic roles (=θ-roles) such as THEME, AGENT, EXPERIENCER, LOCATIVE, GOAL, SOURCE etc.

We suggested that an argument is assigned a θ-role (=θ-marked) via merger with a predicative expression. Hence, in The police have arrested the suspect, the internal argument the suspect is assigned the θ-role of THEME argument of the predicate arrested via merger with arrested; likewise, the external argument the police is assigned the θ-role of AGENT via merger with the V-bar arrested the suspect. We noted that there are constraints on θ-marking imposed by the θ-criterion, which requires each argument to bear one and only one θ-role, and each θ-role assigned by a given predicate to be assigned to one and only one argument. We looked at the syntax of unaccusative predicates like arise/remain/occur etc. and argued that the argument of an unaccusative verb originates as its complement but differs from the complement of a transitive verb in that it receives nominative rather than accusative case. We highlighted a number of further differences between unaccusative predicates and other types of predicate (e.g. in relation to the position of subjects in Belfast English imperatives, and auxiliary selection in earlier varieties of English). We looked at the structure of simple passive clauses, arguing that a passive subject originates as the thematic complement of a subjectless passive participle, and is raised into spec-TP (via A-movement) in order to satisfy the [EPP] feature of T. We saw that passivisation can be a long-distance operation involving movement of an argument contained within an infinitival TP which is the complement of a passive participle. We noted that the position of idiomatic subjects in sentences like Little heed is thought to have been paid to their proposal provides empirical support for positing long-distance passivisation (as a particular instance of a more general A-movement operation whereby T attracts the closest noun or pronoun expression it c-commands to move to spec-TP). We argued that predicates like seem/appear function as raising predicates in the sense that their subjects originate internally within their infinitive complement, and from there are raised to spec-TP position within the seem/appear-clause: hence, in a sentence such as All hell would appear to have broken loose, the idiomatic expression all hell originates as the subject of broken loose and from there is raised up to become the subject of would by A-movement. We contrasted raising predicates with control predicates, noting that they differ in that control predicates θ-mark their subjects (and hence generally require an animate subject) and have a CP complement, whereas raising predicates do not θ-mark their subjects (and hence freely allow inanimate, expletive and idiomatic subjects) and have a TP complement. We also noted that (unlike control predicates), raising predicates preserve truth-functional equivalence under passivisation.