The Syntax of Givenness Ivona Kucerová

We can conclude that G-movement may take place after any merge. The reader might
object though that so far we have seen only cases involving verbal projections. As we will
see in the next section, this follows from the proposal that G-movement is parasitic on overt
head movement. Since there is no overt head movement in other environments, the properties
of G-movement in non-verbal environments cannot be directly tested. 10
To conclude, I have argued in section 2.1 that in Czech there is no unique syntactic position
that is interpreted as given. In this section I have made the argument even stronger,
by showing that G-movement may take place after any merge, and can thus target various
syntactic positions. The argument I presented here was based on the word order in ditransitive
sentences – in particular, on differences in the position of the main verb with respect to
the direct and the indirect object and then on the position of vP and VP adverbs with respect
to the direct and the indirect object. The conclusion that G-movement may take place after
any merge raises an immediate question: what exactly is the landing site of G-movement?
I will address this question in the next section.
2.3 The head movement restriction on G-movement
In this section, I will offer an explanation for the apparent lack of a unique landing site of
G-movement and for the fact that G-movement may take place after any merge. I will argue
that these two properties are a result of G-movement being parasitic on head movement.
I will motivate the head movement restriction on G-movement by a general condition on
merge, namely, merge dependence on agree. 11
In the previous section, we have seen that G-movement may take place after any merge.
We have also seen, in section 1.4, that G-movement of a G-element α forces head movement
of the relevant head. In the following discussion I will refer to the relevant head as
the head of α.
The picture that arises is the following: (i) If the G-element does not have a head
that could move, then G-movement is extremely local, as in (28). (ii) If the G-element
has a head that can move, G-movement can be non-local, as in (29). Notice that in both
cases, after G-movement takes place, the G-element is adjacent to the verb it was originally
merged with. The examples are schematized in (30).
(28) a. What will happen with the refugees?
b. Musíme doufat, že nějaká
must.1pl to-hope that some
nezisková
non-profit
organizace bude běžencům
organization will refugees.Dat
10 Veselovská (1998) argued that there is N-to-D movement in Czech. Her argument is based on fairly
complex possessive constructions including numerals. In these constructions we can indeed find local reorderings.
Unfortunately, I have not figured yet how to control for the involved information structure. I leave
the nominal cases for future research.
11 For concreteness I am assuming the general framework of Chomsky (2000, 2001, 2005). As far as I can
tell nothing much in the current proposal hinges on this choice, but I will not attempt here to explore the
compatibility of the proposal with alternative frameworks.
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