Syntactic Movement

Syntactic movement is the means by which some theories of syntax address discontinuities. Movement was first postulated by structuralist linguists who expressed it in terms of discontinuous constituents or displacement. Certain constituents appear to have been displaced from the position where they receive important features of interpretation. The concept of movement is controversial; it is associated with so-called transformational or derivational theories of syntax (e.g. Transformational Grammar, Government and Binding Theory, Minimalist Program). Representational theories (e.g. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Construction Grammar, most dependency grammars), in contrast, reject the notion of movement, often addressing discontinuities in terms of feature passing instead.