The Syntax of Givenness Ivona Kucerová

Petr’s friends.Acc saw Marie.Nom and he
‘*Marie and he i saw Petr’s i friends.’
A.3 The Weak Cross-Over Effect
Finally, let’s look at the Weak Cross-Over effect (WCO), defined in (19).
(19) Weak Cross-Over:
A pronoun can only be bound from an argument position.
As can be seen in (20), no WCO violation arises in case of G-movement of ‘every girl’.
The example in (21) is here as a control. Long-distance movement leads to a WCO violation.
The contrast shown in (20) and (21) supports the argument that G-movement is
A-movement because it creates new binding relations.
(20) a. *Její pes miluje každou holčičku.
her-i dog.Nom loves every girl.Acc-i
b. Každou holčičku miluje její pes.
every girl.Acc-i loves her-i dog
‘Every girl is loved by her dog.’
(21) *KAŽdou holčičku, chci, aby miloval její pes.
every girl.Acc.TOP-i want-I that loved her-i dog
‘I want every girl to be loved by her dog.’
A.4 A note on base generation
So far I have been assuming that the linear partition between given and new elements is
achieved via movement. However, it has been suggested in the literature that elements on
the left periphery that do not have A-bar properties are base generated in their surface position.
This argument has been made in detail for Romance left clitic dislocation structures
(Cinque 1990; Iatridou 1995; Barbosa 1995). Even though these structures show sensitivity
to syntactic islands, i.e., they appear to undergo movement, the above cited authors argue
that the island sensitivity is a result of the presence of a binding chain that is either entirely
independent of movement, or arises from a short movement within the left periphery. One
could argue that Czech G-movement is just another instance of base generation (notice
that the left dislocated elements in clitic left dislocation constructions are given as well)
and that the various word orders are base generated as they are. Another line of such an
argument has been made in connection with scrambling by Haider (1988); Bayer and Kornfilt
(1994); Kiss (1994); Neeleman (1994); Neeleman and Reinhart (1998), among others.
In this section, I present two objections to a base-generation approach. The first objection
is that the base generation hypothesis does not make clear predictions about the final
word order and it would have to be combined with another system that would determine
the final word order. We have seen in chapter 2 and 3 quite a few examples that suggest a
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