Shape Conservation and Remnant Movement

The wellformedness of the resulting structure is unexpected under representational approaches that require proper binding of traces and check locality constraints at Sstructure; but nothing is wrong with (1) under a strictly derivational approach in which proper binding is replaced by strict cyclicity and locality is checked directly after each movement operation.

Abstract

Standard (``primary'') remnant movement constructions as introduced by Thiersch (1985) and den Besten & Webelhuth (1987; 1990) differ significantly from other (``secondary'') remnant movement constructions as they have recently been proposed by Kayne (1998), Johnson (1998), and others. This paper shows that a unified optimality-theoretic approach is possible if we assume that whereas primary remnant movement is feature-driven, secondary remnant movement is a repair phenomenon -- movement proceeds in violation of Last Resort in order to respect a higher-ranked Shape Conservation constraint (Williams (1999)). On the conceptual side, a new model of optimization in syntax is proposed: Optimization proceeds locally, not globally, and it affects extremely small parts of syntactic derivations. This move is shown to be both conceptually attractive and empirically motivated.