The Syntax of Givenness Ivona Kucerová

Chapter 2
G-movement
In chapter 1, I introduced several basic generalizations about Czech word order and its dependence
on the information structure of an utterance. I proposed to account for the Czech
word order facts by movement which takes place only if a given element is asymmetrically
c-commanded by a new element. I called this movement G-movement. I provided
evidence that G-movement is restricted by head movement. In particular, a given element
may G-move only if the head in the projection of which the given element was base generated
moves as well. Another important point I made was that G-movement cannot be
the grammatical tool that marks or licenses elements as given. The evidence comes from
the fact that only some given elements undergo G-movement. If a given element is in a
configuration where there is no asymmetrically c-commanding new element, the given element
not only does not move, it cannot move. A consequence of this observation is that
G-movement does not seem to be feature-driven.
The purpose of this chapter is to formalize the notion of G-movement and to fill in parts
of the syntactic system that are still missing. In particular, I will look closely at the following
three questions: (i) what is the syntactic target of G-movement? (ii) at what point of
the derivation may G-movement take place? and (iii) what kind of syntactic operation is
G-movement?
In section 2.1, I will provide a partial answer to the question of what a plausible landing
site of G-movement might be. I will argue that Czech has no unique syntactic position that
is always interpreted as given. Thus, we cannot associate G-movement with any particular
syntactic projection. I will refine the analysis of possible landing sites of G-movement in
section 2.2. I will concentrate on the question of when during the derivation G-movement
takes place. I will argue that G-movement may take place after any merge (both internal
and external), thus strengthening the point that G-movement may target various syntactic
positions. In section 2.3, I will explain the apparent lack of a unique landing site of G-
movement and the fact that G-movement may take place after any merge as a consequence
of G-movement being parasitic on head movement. I will show how the head movement
restriction relates to the timing of G-movement and to the apparent lack of a landing site
for G-movement. In particular, I will argue that the parasitic nature of this type of merge
is closely connected to the strict locality conditions and to the lack of a unique syntactic
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