Examples
Movement is the traditional "transformational" means of overcoming the discontinuities associated with wh-fronting, topicalization, extraposition, scrambling, inversion, and shifting, e.g.
-
- a. John has told Peter that Mary likes the first story.
- b. Which story has John told Peter that Mary likes ___?
-
- a. We want to hear that one story again.
- b. That one story we want to hear ___ again.
-
- a. Something that we weren't expecting occurred.
- b. Something ___ occurred that we weren't expecting.
-
- a. You will understand.
- b. Will you ___ understand?
-
- a. She took off her hat.
- b. She took her hat off ___.
The a-sentences show canonical word order, and the b-sentences illustrate the result of movement. Bold script marks the expression that is moved, and the blanks mark the positions out of which movement is assumed to have occurred. Each time, movement takes place in order to focus or emphasize the expression in bold. For instance, the constituent which story in the first b-sentence is the object of the transitive verb likes, the canonical position of an object being immediately to the right of the verb. By fronting the object as a wh-expression, it becomes the focus of communication.
Read more about this topic: Syntactic Movement
Famous quotes containing the word examples:
“There are many examples of women that have excelled in learning, and even in war, but this is no reason we should bring ‘em all up to Latin and Greek or else military discipline, instead of needle-work and housewifry.”
—Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733)
“In the examples that I here bring in of what I have [read], heard, done or said, I have refrained from daring to alter even the smallest and most indifferent circumstances. My conscience falsifies not an iota; for my knowledge I cannot answer.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)