Chomsky showed that no description of natural language syntax would be                  adequate without some notion of movement operations in a syntactic derivation. It                  now seems likely that such movement transformations are formally simple operations,                  in which a single phrase is displaced from its original position within a phrase                  marker, but after more than fifty years of generative theorizing, the mechanics of                  syntactic movement are still murky and controversial. In Provocative Syntax, Phil                  Branigan examines the forces that drive syntactic movement and offers a new                  synthetic model of the basic movement operation by reassembling in a novel way                  isolated ideas that have been suggested elsewhere in the literature. The unifying                  concept is the operation of provocation, which occurs in the course of feature                  valuation when certain probes seek a value for their unvalued features by                  identifying a goal. Provocation forces the generation of a copy of the goal; the                  copy originates outside the original phrase marker and must then be introduced into                  it. In this approach, movement is not forced by the need for extra positions; extra                  positions are generated because movement is taking place. After presenting the                  central proposal and showing its implementation in the analyses of various familiar                  cases of syntactic movement, Branigan demonstrates the effects of provocation in a                  variety of inversion constructions, examines interactions between head and phrasal                  provocation within the "left periphery" of Germanic embedded clauses, and                  describes the details of chain formation and successive cyclic movement in a                  provocation model.

Provocative Syntax (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs) PDF

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