Chapter 5

Question 1

Auxiliary inversion

Answer 1

(adverbial nominals are PPs headed by a null preposition so that what time is a PP headed by a null counterpart of at)

Question 2

T-to-C Movement

Answer 2

T-to-C Movement is a composite operation by which a copy of an auxiliary in T is first moved into C, and then the original occurrence of the auxiliary in T is deleted (by which is meant that its phonetic features are given a null spellout in the PF component and so the auxiliary is unpronounced), leaving a null/silent copy of the auxiliary in T.

Question 3

Copy Theory of Movement

Answer 3

A copy of the T auxiliary will is created, and this adjoins to a null interrogative affix in C, forming what is in effect an interrogative auxiliary, because it is an auxiliary with an (invisible) interrogative affix attached to it.

Question 4

Null operators

Answer 4

Auxiliary Inversion occurs when a C constituent has an interrogative, negative or degree specifier which licenses it to carry a tense feature attracting a T auxiliary to adjoin to C. In yes–no questions, C has a silent yes–no question operator as its specifier, and it is this operator which triggers Auxiliary Inversion in main-clause questions.

Question 5

V-to-T Movement

Answer 5

V-to-T Movement is the movement of a finite main verb from the head position V of VP to the head position T of TP.

Question 6

Is it valid to use historical evidence from a ‘dead’ language variety to explain a syntactic operation permitted by UG?

Answer 6

Yes, because:

1. Universal Grammar contains a set of principles innately programmed into the human Language Faculty, it is not likely for it to have changed.
2. Plenty of evidence (from Shakespeare’s plays) the main verbs could go from V to T, and despite its written nature, this is equally true of many descriptive grammars of present-day English.
3. Many present-day languages show V-to-T movement (French, German, Spanish, etc.), this proves that the phenomenon is not ‘dead’.

Question 7

Head Movement

Answer 7

An item occupying the head position in a lower phrase moves to get attached to the head of a higher place. Head Movement is said to apply in a successive-cyclic fashion. First from V to T, then from T to C. With every movement of the verb, a copy of itself is left behind, which is eventually deleted (Default Spellout Rule).

Question 8

DO-Support

Answer 8

Indicative clauses which contain no other auxiliary require the use of the dummy/expletive DO like in:
(104) (b) He said he would win the race, and he did.
One way to account for it is the economy account. Economy considerations (going back to the Economy Principle) would lead us to expect that DO-support will only be used in structures where use of the more economical auxiliaries structure leads to a crash.
DO-support is used only as a last resort, where the less economical DO-less structure is ungrammatical.
Now, “he did” would be the elided form of “he did win the race” but there are some constructions that can’t undergo VP ellipsis. Chomsky proposed The Recoverability Condition to explain this. This condition states that material can only be deleted if its content is recoverable. The content of a deleted VP will be recoverable if (for instance) there is an identical VP in the same sentence which can serve as an antecedent for the deleted VP.

Question 9

Duke of York Condition

Answer 9

It states that no constituent can move back into a position it has moved out of. We can also formulate this as barring self-attachment which means that it bars a constituent from attaching to a copy of itself. Therefore if we were to lower the affix from C onto T in a sentence with DO-support we would violate this condition because the affix would first move from T to C and then move back into T in the PF component.