Movement In English Language Analysis

Before analysing the nature of movement and its effect on the Head Position Parameter in this sentence, it might be useful to look at what these terms imply in English grammar as construed by Chomsky.

Movement is a syntactic operation (i.e. it is concerned with word order rather than lexis) whereby words or phrases can change their positions in a sentence. Examples are Auxiliary Inversion (as in “Were they happy about it?”) and Wh-Movement (as in “What didn’t you understand?”). Both of these examples of Movement respond to the grammatical operation of question formation. Note that the second example, which illustrates Wh-Movement, also includes Auxiliary Inversion, since this is how questions are formed in English (exceptions are, of course,

Where the canonical word order for a declarative sentence in English would be Subject + Auxiliary + Verb, we find Auxiliary + Subject + Verb, resembling the word order of interrogative sentences in English.

This latter type of Movement might be more sporadic than the other and more common in literary language (although it might have been more frequent in Elizabethan English). Neither one of them, however, is obligatory. This, interestingly enough, illustrates how a non-compulsory operation can override an obligatory parameter setting, but not necessarily cancelling its canonical nature.

Movement, according to Chomsky, serves to satisfy interface conditions. In this case, the fronting of “that letter” provides discourse information at the semantic interface signalling that the constituent is topicalised, and so represents old information, as we can prove by retrieving from Shakespeare’s play the two lines preceding the one analyzed

This is an interrogative clause showing that the Wh-Parameter for English has been set correctly, since the complement of the verb phrase headed by the verb do has been fronted as required in English. Further evidence is in the other examples by the same girl (e.g. Where Daddy gone? and What me having?). There is, however, no evidence as to the Head Position Parameter, but this is because of the nature of this particular sentence. As regards the Null Subject Parameter, the fact that Lucy omits the subject of the sentence raises the question of whether she has not set the parameter appropriately or there is a further reason for not having included it. It should also be noted that there is omission of the finite auxiliary are. This is not a minor detail if we consider the fact that a null subject is not possible in English if its predicate is finite. Perhaps she omitted the subject because she was also omitting the finite element, and in this case there might exist the possibility of her actually knowing that finite verbs do not allow for null subjects, thus deciding to drop the subject and the finite element altogether, believing that what is left is a non-finite clause (in which case a null subject would be allowed for). Here I cannot help remembering what my parents sometimes recall from when I was a little child: I used to ask “¿Qué haciendo?” (the equivalent to “What doing?”) very frequently. Although Spanish is different from