| ROA: | 275 |
|---|---|
| Title: | Order Preservation, Parallel Movement, and the Emergence of the Unmarked |
| Authors: | Gereon Mueller |
| Comment: | |
| Length: | 58 |
| Abstract: | Order Preservation, Parallel Movement, and the Emergence of the Unmarked Gereon Mueller Universitaet Stuttgart Order preservation effects are documented with a number of movement operations in various languages, among them wh-movement in English (superiority), multiple wh-movement in Bulgarian, object shift in Danish and Icelandic, pronoun fronting in German, Case-driven NP raising in English, and quantifier raising in German. Beginning with Lakoff (1971), several analyses have been suggested in the literature that rely on the basic intuition that certain types of movement, under certain conditions, must preserve the pre-movement order of arguments. However, a unified, non-construction specific approach to the phenomenon that reduces all order preservation effects to a single underlying constraint is still outstanding, for what at first sight appear to be good reasons: in many cases, overt movement operations can freely change D-structure order (e.g., this holds for wh-movement of an object across a non-wh- subject). Thus, order preservation should best be viewed as the unmarked case, arising if there is an initial ambiguity of rule application. This idea turns out to be extremely difficult to express in standard syntactic approaches that recognize only inviolable constraints; but things are different under an optimality theoretic approach in which constraints are violable and ranked. In view of this, I will argue for an optimality theoretic analysis that is based on one general constraint called "Parallel Movement" (Par-Move) and thus permits a unified account of order preservation effects. Par-Move is violable and typically ranked quite low; it thereby is correctly predicted that order preservation emerges as the unmarked case with syntactic movement, but is often overruled by higher-ranked constraints. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |