The Syntax of Givenness Ivona Kucerová

and contrastive foci readings. I will argue that even though G-movement is independently
restricted by syntax like any other type of movement, it differs from other types of movement
in that it is parasitic on head movement. The emergence of verb second will be seen
as a consequence of this restriction. In section 1.4 I will explore further consequences of
this restriction, namely, differences in locality restrictions on G-movement dependent on
head movement properties of the relevant head. In the last section of this chapter, 1.5, I
will provide independent evidence for the proposed machinery. I will argue based on the
distribution of pronouns that G-movement is a last resort operation. As such it takes place
only if the relevant interpretation would not otherwise be available.
1.1 G-movement
The idea that word order in a language such as Czech is sensitive to the discourse in the
sense that parts of a clause that are old (given, in the background etc.) linearly precede the
elements that are new in the discourse has been investigated in Czech linguistics for a long
time. 9
The questions that have not, to my knowledge, been successfully addressed yet are (i)
how exactly is the linear partition (i.e., given ≻ new) derived, and (ii) how is the word order
within the old and the new part determined.
Consider the example in (5). This sentence could be an answer to ‘What did Petr do
yesterday with his car?’ The || sign corresponds to the partition between given and new.
Now compare (5) and (6). The example in (6) shows the basic word order and as such it is
a suitable answer to the question ‘What happened?’. 10 As we can see schematized in (7),
the two word orders differ quite radically.
(5) Petr auto včera || řídil rychle.
Petr.Nom car.Acc yesterday drove fast
‘Yesterday Petr drove his car fast.’
←− S O Adv1 V Adv2
9 The relevance of the discourse for word order has already been observed by traditional grammarians (for
example, Gebauer 1900). In the pre-modern tradition, the observation was stated in terms of psychological
and structural subjects. To my knowledge, the intuition about the broader relevance of the discourse was
for the first time formalized in a more systematic way by Vilém Mathesius in Mathesius [1929] 1983 and
Mathesius 1939 (the first version of the paper was presented in Prague in 1908). In order to describe the
relation between word order and the discourse, Mathesius introduced the term aktuální členění. This term is
usually translated as topic focus articulation. This is not an exact translation though. The literal translation
would be something like structuring [of the sentence] dependent on the current context and referred to theme
versus rheme distinction. Authors that further developed the notion of word order dependence on the current
context include, for example, Daneš 1954, 1957, 1974; Novák 1959; ; Dokulil and Daneš 1958; Šmilauer
1960; Adamec 1962; Firbas 1964; Hausenblas 1964; Sgall 1967; Benešová 1968; Hajičová 1973, 1974; Sgall
et al. 1980, 1986; Hajičová et al. 1998, among many others. There is no way I can acknowledge in this study
all of the empirical observations, generalizations and linguistic insight that is present in the previous work on
aktuální členění in Czech.
10 I will provide diagnostics for determining basic word order in 1.2.
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