Movement as well-formedness conditions

Author: Ralph Debusmann

Editor:

We introduce a new formulation of dependency grammar recently suggested in (Duchier and Debusmann, 2001) (henceforth DD). DD shares with GB (Chomsky, 1986) a notion of \emphmovement. In GB, movement is carried out by tree transformations. In DD, it is the effect of well-formedness conditions on dependency trees and does not involve transformations. We illustrate both kinds of movement by showing how both theories analyze German verb-second clauses. Then, we point out the similarities between GB and DD, and raise the question whether GB's transformational notion of movement could be replaced by DD's constraint-based account of movement.