Syntactic Movement - Feature Passing

Feature Passing

Syntactic movement is controversial, especially in light of movement paradoxes. Theories of syntax that posit feature passing reject syntactic movement outright, that is, they reject the notion that a given "moved" constituent ever appears in its "base" position below the surface, i.e. the positions marked by blanks, traces, or copies. Instead, they assume that there is but one level of syntax, whereby all constituents only ever appear in their surface positions - there is no underlying level or derivation. To address discontinuities, they posit that the features of a displaced constituent are passed up and/or down the syntactic hierarchy between that constituent and its governor. The following tree illustrates the feature passing analysis of a wh-discontinuity in a dependency grammar:

The words in red mark the catena (chain of words) that connects the displaced wh-constituent what to its governor eat, the word that licenses its appearance. The assumption is that features (=information) associated with what (e.g. noun, direct object) are passed up and down along the catena marked in red. In this manner, the ability of eat to subcategorize for a direct object NP is acknowledged. By examining the nature of catenae like the one in red here, the locality constraints on discontinuities can be identified.