The Syntax of Givenness Ivona Kucerová

c. #Jeho viděla Marie na nádraží. # pronoun new t
him.Acc saw Marie.Nom on railway-station
d. Pavla viděla Marie na nádraží. ̌DP new t
Pavel.Acc saw Marie.Nom on railway-station
‘Marie saw him/Pavel in the railway-station.’
One could argue that pronouns are excluded from the sentence initial position on independent
grounds. As we can see in (58), with a different information structure, i.e, if the
pronoun is contrastive, the pronoun initial clause is fully acceptable.
(58) JEHO Marie neviděla. Jenom Petra.
him.Acc Marie.Nom not-saw only Petr.Acc
‘Marie didn’t see HIM. She saw only Peter.’
It is well established that pronouns undergo movement from their base generated position.
22 I argue, however, that this is not G-movement. If pronouns underwent G-movement
we would expect them to appear in the same position as full DPs that are given. Most importantly,
they would not be able to be asymmetrically c-commanded by a new element. As
can be seen in (57-a), no such requirement holds for pronouns. In this particular example,
ho ‘him’ is asymmetrically c-commanded by Marie, a new element, but this is not a reason
for the pronoun to move. I argue that pronouns do not undergo G-movement because
G-movement is a last resort operation and as such it takes place if and only if the relevant
semantic interpretation would not be otherwise available. Since pronouns are already
marked from the lexicon as given, G-movement is not needed, hence not allowed. As such,
we can understand G-movement as a disambiguating method: G-movement applies only
to syntactic elements that are lexically ambiguous, i.e., G-movement applies only to lexical
items that can be interpreted either as given, or as new.
This brings up an important point: what is the purpose of G-movement? If G-movement
is a last resort operation, it cannot be the grammatical operation which marks or licenses
an element as given. And yet, it does not apply to an element which is already given. I will
argue in chapter 4 that the purpose of G-movement is to create a syntactic configuration
that can be interpreted by the semantic component as containing given elements. If an element
is already in the right configuration, G-movement does not apply to it. If an element
is already given, G-movement does not take place either.
At this point we do not have the right tools to explain the interactions between given
elements and G-movement. Before we can get there, we need to understand better the
properties of the syntactic configuration in which G-movement occurs.
So far our system does not contain anything that would enforce the difference between
elements marked as given from the lexicon and elements marked as given by the syntax. I
22 Czech weak pronouns are usually analyzed as second position clitics. As such they move to a position
following the first syntactic constituent. For details see, for example, Veselovská 1995; Franks and King
2000; Bošković 2001.
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