Syntactic Movement - The Representation of Movement

The Representation of Movement

The examples above use a blank to mark the position out of which movement is assumed to have occurred. Blanks are just one means of indicating movement, however. Two other means are traces and copies. In transformational grammar, movement has been signaled by a trace t since at least the 1970s proposal by Noam Chomsky, e.g.

b. Which story₁ has John told Peter that Mary likes t₁?

Subscripts help indicate the constituent that is assumed to have left a trace in its former position, the position marked by t. The other means of indicating movement is in terms of copies. Movement is actually taken to be a process of copying the same constituent in different positions, deleting the phonological features in all but one case. Italics are used in the following example to indicate a copy that lacks phonological representation:

b. Which story has John told Peter that Mary likes which story?

While there are various nuances associated with each of these means of indicating movement (blanks, traces, copies), for the most part, each convention has the same goal, which is to indicate the presence of a discontinuity.