The Syntax of Givenness Ivona Kucerová

. Marie dala koně || Pavlovi.
Marie.Nom gave horse.Acc Pavel.Dat
‘Marie gave a horse to Pavel.’
Crucially, I assume that the DO > IO order is not base generated. The argument is difficult
to make though. We will see, however, in chapter 3 that the phenomenon of local
G-movement reordering is widespread and rather complex; we can make better predictions
if we do not allow base generated word order permutations. I will also shortly comment on
base generation approaches in the appendix.
With this assumption in place, the question is how exactly we can derive the local word
order change in (12). Much depends on what we assume to be the position of the verb.
For example, if we assume that the verb may be higher than vP, for instance at TP, then all
three hypotheses would derive the same result. To see this point, consider the following
derivations.
(i) If G-movement takes place at the end of vP phase, we predict the following derivation.
5 After vP is built, the direct object (DO) undergoes G-movement to the edge of the
phase, resulting into (13-b). For convenience, I assume a Larsonian VP shell for ditransitive
verbs (Larson, 1988; Hale and Keyser, 2002). In the end of this section, I will address
the possibility that ditransitives are formed by an applicative head. In the next step of the
derivation, the verb and the subject move to T, as in (13-c). We have seen in 2.1 that in
Czech the subject does not need to move to Spec,TP but let’s assume for the sake of the
argument that it might move there. I put aside for now what exactly the landing site of
G-movement is. I mark the landing site as ?P.
(13) G-movement takes place at a phase level:
a. vP
subject
vP
v
VP
V
VP
IO
VP
V
DO
5 I assume that in Czech vP is a phase. It has been argued that VP can be phase in some languages as
well (cf. Ko (2007) for Korean and Fox and Pesetsky (2005) for Scandinavian languages). The difference is
immaterial for our discussion. The option that VP is a phase equals to the hypothesis that G-movement takes
place in the end of a maximal projection. As we will see shortly, this hypothesis make incorrect predictions
as well.
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