a) Levels of representation

So far, we've simply probed the structure of declarative sentences such as "The mouse bit the parrot" to reveal some of the properties of a phrase structure grammar. What would we do if we had a sentence like the following?

• Who(m) did the mouse bite?

What would its structure look like? Is there some way that it is "related" to the sentence "The mouse bit the parrot."? That's the question for this final section of the syntax part of the review sheet.

Such questions are called Wh-questions. Questions come in various flavors.

• yes/no questions: Are you going to the game this weekend?
• Wh-questions: Who won the big game? Where are you going? How old are you (yes/no is not an appropriate response to a wh-question.)
• Echo-questions:
• a: I bought an alligator.
• b: You bought an alligator?
• Wh-echo questions:
• a: I bought an alligator.
• b: You bought what?

• a: Did you buy an alligator?
• b: Did I buy what?
• a: Don't touch my alligator.
• b: Don't touch your what?

Note: Echo questions look syntactically just like the sentences that they are echoing. Non-echo questions, however, exhibit changes.

What I want to argue here is that the objective (also known as accusative) CASE of the Wh-word "whom" gives us evidence that whom has arrived at its position at the front of the sentence via movement. In fact, one thing that the old who/whom distinction is good for is shedding a bit of light on what happens when sentences are formed, since in some dialects of English, there's still a distinction between who/whom. This distinction is parallel to the following:

• I/*me fainted.
• Zim saw me/*I.
• Mary won't speak to me/*I.

This shows up in who/whom for some people in declaratives like:

• A: I know Zim loves Kim.
• B: I know who/*whom loves Kim.
•  
• A: I know Zim loves Kim.
• B: I know Zim loves *who/whom? (echo question)

Bearing these echo questions in mind, consider the following:

• Who/*whom do you know loves Kim.
• *Who/whom do you know Zim loves.

How can we understand what's going on here. Well, we can understand what's going on if we understand the questions as involving MOVEMENT from an underlying position in the declarative sentence. The case of the pronoun comes from its position in the base structure "prior" in some sense to movement. So, we can think of each wh-word as originating in either subject or object position (that's how it gets its appropriate case) and then moving to the front of the sentence, potentially pretty far away from where it started.

Consider these sentences:

• Kim might say this wombat likes Zim
• Kim might say these wombats like Zim

 
 
 

• Which wombat might Kim say likes / *like Zim
• Which wombats might Kim say like / *likes Zim

Note: the verb "to like" agrees in number with the subject. But there is no subject next to the verb in the question in the pair of Wh-questions. So, what is the verb agreeing with? We can understand the agreement facts if we view the wh-phrase subject (which wombat/s) as moving from subect position before "like" all the way left to the front of the sentence.

e) Idioms as evidence for movement

English has a bunch of NPs that are highly restricted in their distribution. These are idioms in which the NP basically can only follow a particular verb. Examples are:

• Kim took advantage of Zim's generosity.
• The gov't keeps tabs on all of us.
• I want you to take note of what I say.
• The soldiers paid homage to their dead.

Note that it's strange to say:

• Kim is really interested in *advantage/tabs/note/heed
• Tabs/note/heed/advantage really turn(s) me on.
• Have you heard the one about tabs/advantage/heed/note

This shows that idioms don't behave like normal NPs. They can't appear unless preceded by their accompanying verb. But, idiomatic NP's can MOVE, which is somewhat surprising:

• How much heed do you think the committee will pay t to my proposals?
• How much advantage will Clinton take of an inexperienced congress.

If they aren't normal NPS, why can they be fronted in Wh-questions? Well, maybe because they originate in their idiom position and are moved. That is, maybe in some sense, they are still part of the original idiom construction, because they originate before movement from a position that immediately follows the verb that always accompanies them.

Here are some more sentences:

• Marion is good at track, and Mia is good at soccer.
• Marion is good at track, and Mia's good at soccer. 

What we see here is a regular process of contraction where "Mia is" contracts to form "Mia's". What's interesting is that contraction isn't always possible:

• Marion is good at track, and Mia is at soccer.
• *Marion is good track, and Mia's at soccer.
• (Yuck--that's what the asterisk means, remember. This sentence is bad on the reading that "Mia is good at soccer". For this  we need to say: "Marion's (or Marion is) good at track, and Mia's good at soccer.")

What we see here is that we can't contract if a constituent is missing. In this case, "good" is missing in the sentence that doesn't allow contraction. So, this helps us to understand the following data:

• How good do you think Mary is at Linguistics?
• *How good do you think Mary's at Linguistics? (YUCK AGAIN)

What is going on here is this: contraction is blocked because "how good" originated after "Mary is" and "before linguistics". By virtue of moving, it makes for a missing constituent, and contraction is not allowed!

This treatment of Wh-movement has large consequences. Specifically, it commits to two levels of structutre in our syntactic grammar:

• a Base or D-structure (D used to stand for Deep, but linguists didn't like the way non-linguists misunderstood the metaphor)
• and a Surface or S-structure

The base level is the level where all the grammatical relations are clearly shown. Subjects are in subject position, objects are in object position, and so forth. S-Structure is what happens after movement rules apply. It's what we wind up hearing, so to speak. Now, besides Wh-movement we have lots of other cases. Just think about sentences like "Him, I like." Where to you think "him" started out at D-structure? That's right, in object position after the verb where it got its object case. At any rate, though we've just begun to scratch the surface, you can see that our syntax must consist of at least two things:

• 1) A Base or D-Structure (where phrase structure rules generate well formed trees)
• 2) A surface or S-Structure (that results from moving items from their D-structure origins)

In case you're curious, much interesting syntactic research involves exploring just what can be moved and what the constraints are on movement in terms of distance.