8.9 Move
Check Yourself
1. Which tree diagram correctly represents the question, “Could you hand me those scissors?”
2. Which tree diagram correctly represents the question, “Does Suresh like Ethiopian food?”
3. Which tree diagram correctly represents the question, “Will the Habs win the Stanley Cup?”
Video Script
We’ve developed a model of the mental grammar that says that we draw words, morphemes, and morphosyntactic features from our mental lexicon, and then the operation MERGE combines all these items into a grammatical x-bar structure. In this unit, we’re going to look at another operation of the mental grammar, called MOVE, which takes a part of a sentence and moves it somewhere else in the sentence. But why would we want to do that? Let’s look at some examples to figure it out.
Let’s take our now-familiar sentence, Ann hopes that the Leafs will win. Hope is one of those verbs that takes a whole clause as its complement, and that clause is introduced by the complementizer that in C-head position. But what if Ann isn’t hoping, what if she’s asking whether there’s any possibility of her hopes being realized? If she’s asking instead of hoping, the complementizer that doesn’t work as well here. It’s grammatical if we use the complementizer if. I’m going to suggest that the reason the complementizer that doesn’t fit very well in this position is because the verb head ask doesn’t just subcategorize for a complement clause — it’s even pickier than that! The verb ask subcategorizes for a question clause. And the difference between a regular complement clause and a question clause is that a question clause has a [+Q] feature in the C-head position.
So we’re seeing another instance of a morphosyntactic feature occupying a head position. The strange thing about features is that they don’t get pronounced. We know that morphemes and words link up a form (either spoken or written) with a meaning. But features have meaning and don’t have any form of their own. The tense feature does its job by making sure that its complement has the right form. And one way that the [+Q] feature does its job is by making sure that the thing in the C-head has the right form. So if is ok when the C-head has a [+Q] feature in it, but that is not so good.
There’s another way that the [+Q] feature can make itself noticed, though. In English, if we want to ask a question, we don’t do it like this: If the Leafs will win? How do we form that question when it’s not embedded inside another clause? Of course, it’s Will the Leafs win? How did that modal will get from its position between the subject and the main verb up to the beginning of the sentence? Here’s where the operation MOVE comes in.
The theory claims that the operation MERGE generates this structure for the question. This looks just like the declarative sentence, The Leafs will win, except that it has a [+Q] feature in the C-head position. That [+Q] feature needs people to know that it’s there; it’s not like the null compl