The Syntax of Givenness Ivona Kucerová

2.4 Summary
In this chapter, I have addressed the question of what kind of movement G-movement is. In
particular, I have looked closely at the following three questions: (i) what is the syntactic
target of G-movement? (ii) at what point of the derivation does G-movement take place?
and (iii) what kind of syntactic operation is G-movement?
In section 2.1, I showed that Czech has no unique syntactic position that is always interpreted
as given. In the next section, section 2.2, I provided further evidence in favor
of this claim by showing that G-movement may take place after any merge. I explained
these properties of G-movement by tying them to the observation that G-movement of α is
restricted by the head movement possibilities of the head of α. In section 2.3, I suggested
that an element α can move without a feature trigger if the new merge relation contains
the feature matching set of the original merge relation and if the new structure affects the
semantic interpretation.
In the next chapter, I will refine the system in place by looking at more complex derivations
that contain several instances of G-movement. In particular, I will look at utterances
where more than one element can precede the verbal partition. I will show that these strings
can be derived by several instances of movement or they can be derived by phrasal movement
of a whole subtree. The combination of these two strategies will allow us to capture
various word order combinations found in Czech.
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