AUTHORS

Williams (1981): Separation between:

● External arguments: Argument not contained in the maximal projection of V-core.
● Internal arguments (complements and objects): arguments of a verb that has to be
realized inside the maximal projection of that verb.
They’re both in the lexical domain.

Perlmutter (1978): Intransitive verbs are divided into:

● Unaccusative (no external arguments, so no v-shell. Non-agentive (no doer of the
action. Sth happened to an element. “Arrive, be, appear, go, stay, fall”)
● Unergative (have an external argument. It has a doer/experiencer. They have a
missing element that would make it a TV but it would be redundant. It has
incorporation)

Abney (1987): He determined that all Nouns are headed by a functional element
Determiner. They’re all DPs. Arguments in favour:
● Proper nouns like “John” have an overt determiner in some languages such as Greek
● “John” and the DP “the chairman” can be coordinated.

Baker (1988): He introduced the concept of incorporation: An internal argument of

unergative verbs is incorporated to the lexical root of the verb.

Koopman and Sportiche (1991): Arguments generate in the lexical domain of the
predicators. Arguments need to have been selected by the predicator, so that it assigns
them a specific theta role in a specific position.

Rizzi (1997): Argues that the various CPs involved in CP recursion structures are different in
nature. He concludes that CPs should be split into a number of different types of peripheral
projections. Split projection analysis (a CP is split into a number of different types of
peripheral projections. E.g. a force projection, a focus projection, a topic projection)

Hyams (?): Having a look at the way in which English children produce sentences, we can
clearly see that they tend to omit subjects and end up producing subjectless sentences, such
as: Play it. Eating cereal. Shake hands. Hams observed that immediately after producing
subjectless sentences, children sometimes produce an expanded version of the same
sentence immediately afterwards in which the implicit subject is made explicit, such as: No
touch...This notouch. Having done this research, Hyams concluded that seemingly
subjectless child sentences have an understood “silent” subject, and argued that this is the
same kind of null pronoun subject (pro) as is found in Italian and Spanish. Child in English is
a null subject language and so allows verbs to have null subjects.

HEAD MOVEMENT CONSTRAINT

● A principle of Universal Grammar which specifies that movement between one head
position and another is only possible between the head of a given structure and the
 head of its complement (the sister of head) in a given type of structure. Head
movement applies in a successive cyclic fashion, moving the element in successive
steps. That’s one of the reasons why there cannot be movement from V to C. There
needs to be an intermediate step in T. So: V --> T --> C. Each time an element
moves, it leaves behind a copy of itself which is eventually deleted in accordance
with the Default Spell Out Rule.
● Types of head movement:
○ T to C movement: movement of an auxiliary or non-auxiliary verbs from the
head T position of TP into the head C position of CP. Reason: to have
subject-auxiliary inversion.
○ V to T movement: movement of the verb from the head V position of the VP
into the head T position of TP. The verb to be in Modern English is the only
verb that has strong features and can therefore move from V position to T
position.
○ V-core to v-shell movement: to make room for the external argument.

ADEQUACY
Observational Adequacy: “the grammar of a particular language specifies which sentences
are and are not well formed in that language.” (Green 2006, 49) The observationally
adequate grammar is built upon the data observed from a certain corpus and does not take
into account the sentences and linguistic constructions outside the assigned corpus.
Descriptive Adequacy: “The grammar of a particular language satisfies the condition of
descriptive adequacy insofar as it gives a full and accurate account of the properties of the
language, of what the speaker of the language knows.” (Chomsky 2000, 7) A descriptively
adequate grammar regards the tacit knowledge of language of the native speakers (for
example when making judgments on the acceptability of a sentence or structure), but it does
not motivate or explain where this knowledge that the speaker possesses comes from.
Explanatory Adequacy: It has to satisfy both the Observational Adequacy and the
Descriptive Adequacy. It mostly stands for discovering linguistics universals. The explanatory
adequate grammar goes beyond just describing the tacit knowledge of language, but even
explains where the knowledge comes from, focusing on the mental aspects. “A linguistic
theory that aims for explanatory adequacy is concerned with the internal structure of the
device [i.e. grammar]; that is, it aims to provide a principled basis, independent of any
particular language, for the selection of the descriptively adequate grammar of each
language” Chomsky (1964, 63).

SPECIFIER
An expression that merges with an intermediate projection to project it into a maximal
projection. In structures where a head has two different specifiers the lower one is said to be
the inner specifier and the higher one the outer specifier

AFFIX HOPPING
When a tense affix in head T remains unattached at the end of the syntactic derivation, in
the PF (phonetic form) component, the affix is lowered onto the closest head V below T.
Affix-hopping is the lowering of a tense affix that can’t stand on its own to the closest V
below T position.

OPERATIONS
Types:
● Merge: An operation by which two constituents are combined together to form a
single larger constituent. Internal merge: merging a copy of a constituent positioned
internally within a given structure with the root of the structure. External merge:
introducing a new constituent into the structure and merging it with the root.
● Movement: An operation by which (a copy of) a constituent is displaced from one
position in a given structure and comes to occupy another position in the structure.
● Agreement: An operation by which the grammatical features of an element (person,
number, gender, case) get assigned the same values as the element they relate to. A
type of agreement is concord: an operation whereby a noun and any adjectives or
determiners modifying it are assigned the same values.
● Ellipsis: An operation by which an expression is omitted in order to avoid repetition.
An ellipsed constituent is generally taken to be present in the syntax, but given a
silent pronunciation in the PF component.

TYPES OF ELLIPSIS
● Sluicing: the material following an interrogative constituent is given a silent
pronunciation: “Someone ate my food, but I don’t know who ate my food”
● Gapping: The head word is omitted from one (or more) of the conjuncts in a
coordinate structure in order to avoid repetition. “I ordered pasta, and Mary ordered a
pizza”
● VP-ellipsis: A whole VP is given a silent pronunciation. “I told her she should wash
her clothes, but she didn’t want to wash her clothes”

TYPES OF MOVEMENT
● Head to Head movement: Extraction site: one head position. Landing site: head
position of the phrase immediately above the phrase of the extraction site. The
movement of a word from one head position to another. Examples: movement of an
auxiliary from T to C, or of a finite main verb from V to T (only with the verb to be or in
Elizabethan English).
● Argument movement: A movement operation where the external argument of vP
(v-shell) moves to the specifier position of T. Reasons: to satisfy the EPP (Extended
Projection Principle) feature, which is the need for T to have a specifier, and to get
nominative case.
● Wh-movement: movement operation where an element is moved to the specifier of
C position. It’s usually a wh-expression that moves to specifier of C position to form
an interrogative or exclamative clause. Wh-movement also occurs in relative clauses,
TopicP, FocusP, etc (also called A’ movement).
 DERIVATION OF PHRASAL AND PREPOSITIONAL VERBS
Verbs with a prepositional particle (prepositional verbs) aren’t separable.
Verbs with an adverbial particle (phrasal verbs) can have the complement after the particle,
or between the verb and the particle. The only exception is when the complement is a
pronoun, in which case the complement must be between the verb and the particle.

● Transitive phrasal verbs: require two internal arguments selected by the predicator:
one is the particle and the other one is the object. One argument appears as the
specifier of head V and the other as the complement of head V.
● Prepositional verbs: require only one internal argument. The particle appears as
the complement of head V.

C-COMMAND
● It helps us determine the relative position of two different constituents within the
same tree.
● If X and Y are independent constituents (i.e. if neither of them contain the other), X
C-commands Y if and only if the mother of X contains Y
Z
/ \
X Y
● The relation C-command plays an important role in a wide range of syntactic
phenomena. One such is the phenomenon of anaphor binding. Anaphors are
expressions which CANNOT have independent reference, but which must take its
reference from an appropriate antecedent within the same phrase or sentence
(Chomsky 1981). They must be within the same CP domain (Chomsky 1986). Two
types of anaphors in English are reflexive anaphors (-self) and reciprocal anaphors
(each other / one another). In a sentence like “John blamed himself”, the reflexive
anaphor himself is bound by John in the sense that John determines the referential
properties of himself. John must c-command himself for the sentence to be
grammatical. Another phenomenon is polarity expressions (Klima 1964):: words
such as partitive any (and anyone, anything, anywhere) must be c-commanded by an
affective constituent (a negative, interrogative or conditional constituent. This is
called the Polarity Licensing Condition.
● Counterexamples: Exempt anaphors (they are exempt from the Anaphor Binding
Condition). Anaphors inside a NP (“People like myself”)

TYPES OF RELATIVE CLAUSES ACCORDING TO RADFORD

● Restrictive Relative Clauses (defining relative clauses):
○ Modify a nominal or pronominal antecedent.
○ Usually immediately follows its antecedent
 ○ Restrict the class of entities referred to by the antecedent to those which have
the property described in the relative clause.
○ Can be introduced by relative WH pronouns (“I only work with people who I
can trust”), by a complementizer (“I don’t have anyone that I can rely one” (in
Traditional Grammar: subordinating conjunction); “There’s nothing for me to
do); or neither an overt relative pronoun nor an overt complementizer (“Mary
is somebody he really cares about”)
● Appositive relative clauses (non-defining relative clauses):
○ Generally serve as parenthetical comments
○ Can be used to qualify and modify proper nouns (“John, who used to live in
Cambridge, is a very good friend of mine) and can also have a clausal
antecedent (“Mary has left home -which is very upsetting for her parents”)
○ Can only be introduced by a relative WH word
● Free relative clauses (nominal relative noun clauses)
○ Function more like nominals
○ No antecedent
○ Use: what, how, wh+ever (“You can’t use whatever you want” “What he did
was amazing)
● Contact/Zero relative clauses: structures in which the edge of the relative clause
CP contains no overt material (e.g. no relative pronoun or complementiser), as with
the italicised relative clause in ‘There’s a farmer I buy vegetables from in the village.’
● Resumptive relative clauses: relative clauses which contain a resumptive pronoun
(or nominal), as with the italicised clause in ‘He’s someone that I don’t know anyone
who trusts him.’

PIED-PIPING
It’s a process by which a moved constituent drags one or more other constituents along with
it when it moves. If we compare sentences like Who were you talking to? with To whom were
you talking? We can say that in both cases the pronoun who is moved to the front of the
sentence, but that in the second sentence the preposition to is pied-piped along with the
pronoun who.
Optional pied-piping: Additional material can be optionally pied-piped in some cases along
with a moved constituent. Which hotel is he staying in? (preposition left stranded) - In which
hotel is he staying? (preposition is pied-piped along with the wh-phrase when it’s fronted)

SPLITTING PROJECTIONS
If the need arises, some categories must be splitted.
“Reading all those three books”: there are three determiners so you have to split them into
predeterminer, central determiner and post determiner.
When there is more than one auxiliary, you need to divide it. “We must have been doing
homework”. Have: PerfP - been: ProgP
Split CP: CPs can be split into ForceP, TopicP and FocusP. “Mom wonders if (ForceP) Susan
(TopicP), under no circumstances (FocusP) will he hate”

PRINCIPLE vs PARAMETER
Principle: potentially universal properties of natural language grammars.
Parameter: a dimension of grammatical variation between different languages or different
language varieties (e.g. Null Subject Parameter, Head Position Parameter).

PRINCIPLES & CONDITIONS

● Binary principle: A principle of Universal Grammar specifying that all non-terminal
nodes in syntactic structures are binary-branching. It’s assumed that parameters
have binary settings.
● Chain uniformity condition: A condition which specifies that all the links in a
movement chain must have the same structure features. Example: all the links must
be heads, or all the links must be maximal projections.
● Coordination condition: Only constituents of the same type can be coordinated.
● Constituency condition: Heads and maximal projections are the only types of
constituent which can take part in linguistic operations like Movement, Agreement or
Ellipsis.
● Economy principle: Structures and the operations used to form them should be as
economical as possible. For example, the first auxiliary is the one that undergoes
movement in Auxiliary Inversion.
● Fragment Condition: Only a maximal projection can serve as a sentence fragment.
● Headedness principle: It specifies that every constituent must be headed by a
lexical item.
● Modification condition: Only a string of words which is a constituent can be
modified by an appropriate type of modifier.
● Structure dependency principle: All syntactic operations are structure-dependent
(in the sense that they are sensitive only to hierarchical containment relations
between constituents, not left-to-right linear ordering). Linear order is not a syntactic
phenomenon (but rather a PF phenomenon). This entails that syntactic operations
cannot be sensitive to word order

STRONG AND WEAK FEATURES OF VERBS

Most verbs have weak features in Modern English. However, the verb to be and sometimes
the verb have are the only ones in Modern English which have strong features. This means
that in a tree diagram, they can move from V position to T position.
 BARRIERS
Chomsky states that CP layers constitute a barrier, which has an edge feature that makes it
impossible for an element to move from two or more clauses at once. First, the element
needs to land in the specifier of C before going higher in the derivation. In specifier CP
there’s a checking of the element’s features.
Barriers affect a number of operations such as anaphors, wh-movement, and raising and
control.
Anaphors must be bound within the same CP layer (Chomsky 1986)

Implications for wh-movement: C has an edge feature > wh-feature > demands a wh-word.
Successive cyclic movement to satisfy the wh-feature of the embedded clause. A
wh-operator can’t simply move to another clause in one go. A wh-movement has to be
applied in two separate steps: first, move the wh-pronoun to a specifier CP in the
complement clause and then to specifier CP of the main clause.

UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
It is a theory developed by Chomsky that explores the nature of possible grammars
of human languages and identifies the defining properties of all of them. It argues that the
ability to learn a language is innate, distinctly human and distinct from all other aspects of
human cognition.

INNATENESS HYPOTHESIS
The hypothesis that children have a biologically endowed innate Language Faculty:
there is a critical period for the acquisition of syntax, in the sense that children who learn a
given language before puberty generally achieve native competence in it, whereas those
who acquire a (first or second) language after the age of 9 years or so rarely manage to
achieve native-like syntactic competence. A particularly poignant example of this is a child
called Genie, who was deprived of speech input and kept locked up on her own in a room
until age 13. When eventually taken into care and exposed to intensive language input, her
vocabulary grew enormously, but her syntax never developed. This suggests that the
acquisition of syntax is determined by an innate language acquisition programme which is in
effect switched off (or gradually atrophies) around the onset of puberty.
Evidence:
● The ability to speak and acquire languages is unique to human beings and that
natural languages incorporate principles which are also unique to humans and which
reflect the nature of the human mind.
● Language acquisition is an ability which all humans possess, entirely independently
of their general intelligence.
● The apparent uniformity in the types of grammars developed by different speakers of
the same language suggests that children have genetic guidance in the task of
constructing a grammar of their native language.
● The rapidity of acquisition (once the grammar spurt has started) also points to
genetic guidance in grammar construction.
 ● All children usually go through similar stages of language acquisition. What makes it
even more remarkable is the fact that the child’s linguistic experience is often
imperfect, since it is based on the linguistic performance of adult speakers, and this
may be a poor reflection of their competence. If much of the speech input with
children receive is ungrammatical because of performance errors, how is it that they
can use this degenerate experience to develop a grammar which specifies how to
form grammatical sentences?
● In much the same way as we are genetically predisposed to analyse shapes
(however irregular) as having specific geometric properties, so too we are genetically
predisposed to analyse sentences.
● Language acquisition is an entirely subconscious and involuntary activity (in the
sense that you can’t consciously choose whether or not to acquire your native
language –though you can choose whether or not you wish to learn chess); it is also
an activity which is largely unguided (in the sense that parents don’t teach children to
talk).
● Human Language Faculty is (in certain respects) autonomous of nonlinguistic
cognitive systems such as vision, hearing, reasoning or memory comes from the
study of language disorders. Some disorders involve impairment of linguistic abilities
without concomitant impairment of other cognitive systems.

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE (LAD)

The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a claim from language acquisition research
proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s. The LAD concept is a purported instinctive
mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It is a component
of the nativist theory of language. This theory asserts that humans are born with the instinct
or "innate facility" for acquiring language. The main argument given in favor of the LAD was
the argument from the poverty of the stimulus, which argues that unless children have
significant innate knowledge of grammar, they would not be able to learn language as
quickly as they do, given that they never have access to negative evidence and rarely
receive direct instruction in their first language.

EVIDENCE
How children come to arrive at appropriate settings for a given parameter, and what kinds of
evidence they make use of in setting parameters.
● Positive evidence: a set of observed expressions illustrating a particular
phenomenon. For example, if the speech input of children acquiring English as their
native language is made up of structures in which heads precede their complements,
this provides children with positive evidence that enables them to set the Head
Position Parameter at the head-first setting appropriate to English.
● Negative evidence:
○ Direct: Correction of children’s errors by other speakers of the language.
Correction plays a fairly insignificant role in language acquisition: it is
relatively infrequent and children are usually unresponsive to correction.
 ○ Indirect: Evidence relating to the non-occurrence of certain types of
structure. If a child does not receive examples of structures in which heads
follow their complements, the child might infer that English is not a head-last
language.

TRUNCATION
Leaving a sequence of one or more “weak” words at the beginning of a sentence
unpronounced , perhaps for phonological reasons. Missing subjects in Child English are a
clear example of truncation, and it’s also found in colloquial adult English.
e.g. “Can’t find it” - (I) can’t find it - truncation of “I” “Know anything about it?” - truncation of
“Do you”

DO-support
The use of the “dummy” AUX do to form questions, negatives or tags in sentences which
would otherwise contain no auxiliary.

PREPOSITIONS
A category of words generally used to express location, manner, etc. They are invariable and
can generally be modified by straight/right. Where a preposition has a nominal or pronominal
complement, they’re said to be transitive (they take accusative pronouns). If they don’t take
any complements, they’re intransitive (“He fell down”)

IM to vs PREPOSITION to
IM to:
● Complement: A verb in the infinitive form
● Has no lexical semantic content
● Cannot be modified by intensifiers like right/straight
● Allows ellipsis of its complement

PREPOSITION to:
● Complement: nominal expression
● It has intrinsic lexical semantic content
● Can be modified by intensifiers like right/straight
● Does NOT allow ellipsis of its complement
● Genuine prepositions in English only permit a following verbal complement when the
verb is in the -ing form (known as the gerund form in this particular case), not when
the verb is in the infinitive form.

IM and AUXILIARIES
Chomsky (1970s) suggested that there are significant similarities between infinitival to and a
typical auxiliary like should.
● They occupy a similar position within a clause:
○ It’s vital [that John should show interest]
○ It’s vital [for John to show interest]
● They both require after it a verb in the infinitive form.
 ● Infinitival to behaves like typical auxiliaries but unlike typical non-auxiliary verbs in
allowing ellipsis/deletion of its complement:
○ I don’t really want to go to the dentist, but I know I should go to the dentist
○ I don’t really want to go to the dentist, but I just don’t want to go to the dentist
○ *I don’t really want to go to the dentist, but I just don’t want to go to the dentist

COMPLEMENTISERS
A word which is used to introduce complement clauses (that/if/for/whether). In traditional
terms, they were called subordinating conjunctions.
They encode particular sets of grammar properties:
● Finiteness:
○ Finite: that / if
○ Non-finite: for
● Clause type:
○ Interrogative: if
○ Declarative: that
○ Irrealis: for (a clause denoting an unreal or hypothetical event which hasn’t
yet happened and may never happen)

COMPLEMENTISER vs PREPOSITION
Preposition for has substantive lexical semantic content and so can be intensified by
straight/right, whereas complementiser for is a functor and cannot be intensified.
A clause introduced by the complementiser for can be the subject of an expression (For him
to resign would cause chaos) whereas a phrase introduced by the preposition for cannot
(*For him would cause chaos).
Prepositions in English aren’t generally followed by an infinitival complement (*I’m not sure
about [you to be there]), whereas complementizer for can only have an infinitival
complement.
A nominal or pronominal expression following for can be preposed to the front of the
sentence (with or without for) if for is a preposition, but not if for is a complementiser.
I will vote for Senator Megabucks in the primaries. Prep: For which senator will you vote in
the primaries?
They were anxious for Senator Megabucks to keep his cool. Compl: *For which senator were
they anxious to keep his cool?

ADJECTIVES vs DETERMINERS
● Semantic difference: adjectives have descriptive semantic content but determiners
and quantifiers do not; determiners and quantifiers are functional categories, and
adjectives a lexical category.
● Syntactic difference: adjectives can be iteratively stacked in front of a noun they
modify, in the sense that you can go on putting more and more adjectives in front of a
given noun VS neither determiners nor quantifiers can be stacked in this way;
determiners, quantifiers and adjectives can be used together to modify a noun, but
when they do so, any determiner or quantifier modifying the noun has to precede any
 adjective(s) modifying the noun. Also, determiners can be pronominalised but
adjectives cannot.
● Morphological difference: quantifiers and determiners differ from adjectives in not
allowing derivational affixes to be attached to them; determiners/quantifiers generally
have specific number (or countability) properties while typical adjectives can
generally be used to modify all three types of nouns

CLASSIFICATION OF PRONOUNS
N-pronouns: takes its descriptive content from its antecedent: “I like red apples but she
prefers green ones.
Q-pronouns: Many died in the accident. I don’t have any
D-pronouns: I prefer that. Those are good
Personal pronouns: I / you / mine. They have case inflection, person, number, gender

CRITERIA FOR THE CLASSIFICATION OF WORDS

Semantic: what a category denotes (nouns denote entities, verbs denote actions, adjectives
denote states, adverbs denote manner, prepositions denote location). Semantically based
criteria for identifying categories can be misleading: assassination denotes an action but is a
noun; in fast food, fast denotes the manner in which the food is prepared but is an adjective,
not an adverb. That’s why it’s better to use morphosyntactic criteria.
Morphological: Concern the inflectional and derivational properties of a category.
Inflectional: different forms of the same category (-s for the plural of countable nouns)
Derivational: process by which a word from a certain category can be used to form another
word from another category.(-ly to change an adjective into an adverb).
Syntactic: different categories have different distributions (they occupy a different range of
positions within phrases or sentences)

SUBSTITUTION TEST
Syntactic test to determine the category a word belongs to. Seeing whether a particular word
in a sentence can be replaced by a N / V / P / ADJ / etc.
Example: Adj & Adv:
He is better at French than you --- He is more fluent at French than you (Better: adj)
He speaks French better than you --- He speaks French more fluently than you (Better: adv)

DEFINITIONS OF LANGUAGE
Traditional definition: Language is a purely human & non-instinctive method of
communicating ideas, emotions & desires by means of voluntary produced symbols (Sapir
1921)
Biological approach: Language is a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length
and constructed out of a finite set of elements (Chomsky 1957). Focus on SENTENCES
Social view: Language is a network of systems, or interrelated sets of options for making
meaning (Halliday)
 DEFINITIONS OF GRAMMAR
Traditional: Grammar is the study of morphology, which deals with the form of words, and
syntax, which deals with the arrangement of words into sentences (Collins & Hollo 2000:3).
Classificatory lists of structures, concepts and techniques of a given language.
Generative: The grammar of a language is to be thought of as a device of some sort for
producing the sentences of the language under analysis (Chomsky 1957:13). A grammar is
a collection of descriptive statements concerning sentences understood independently of the
mind (Chomsky 1986:20). Tries to reach a deeper understanding of the nature of the
language.

APPROACH SYMBOL FOCUS AIM

Traditional Grammar TG Description Classification

Generative Grammar GG Explanation Generation

Functional Grammar FG Function Meaning

AUXILIARIES VERBS
Usually allow only a verb expression as May take a range of different types of
their complement. They have the semantic complements
function of marking grammatical properties
associated with the relevant verb, such as
aspect, voice, tense, mood.

Can undergo inversion Cannot undergo inversion. They require

DO-support

Can generally be directly negated by a Cannot themselves be directly negated by

following not not/n’t, but require indirect negation using
DO-support

Can appear in tag questions Can’t be used in tag questions. They

require the use of DO-support or other
auxiliaries

PREDICATES vs ARGUMENTS
Predicate:
● Traditional Grammar: An expression that combines with a subject to form a clause,
in which the predicate says something about the subject.
● Logic: A word/expression denoting an action, event, or state involving one or more
participants (said to be the arguments of the predicate)
Arguments: participants selected by the predicate.
 FORCE / FOCUS / TOPIC

● Force: The complementisers that/if in a sentence are said to indicate that the
bracketed clauses are declarative/interrogative in force. In a split CP projection,
complementisers are said to constitute a Force Head which can project into a
ForcePhrase. It is always present in split CP projections.
● Topic: Fronting old information previously mentioned in the discourse to refer back to
it. The head of the TopP is null. The element that underwent movement occupies the
specifier position. There is no inversion of order. It involves wh-movement.
● Focus: A position occupied by a constituent which is emphasized in some way,
usually in order to mark it as containing “new” or relevant information. This happens
in cleft sentences and pseudo-cleft sentences. Focus Movement is an operation by
which a focused constituent is moved to the beginning of a clause in order to mark it
as introducing new information. In a split CP projection, preposed focused
expressions are said to occupy the specifier position within a FocusPhrase projection
which is headed by a Focus Head. The Focus Condition specifies that only a
maximal projection can be focused. There is inversion of order. Involves
wh-movement.

LF component vs PF component
Syntactic structures (sentences) are made up of words combined together that had been
chosen out of the lexicon (dictionary or list of all lexical items in a given language) taking into
account the syntax. This syntactic structure serves as input into two other components:
1) Semantic component (LF component): it maps the syntactic structure into a semantic
representation, in which the logical relations between constituents are specified (Logical
Form Component). It interfaces with systems of thought.
2) Phonological component (PF component): it maps the syntactic structure into a Phonetic
Form, telling us how it is pronounced. It interfaces with systems of speech.

SCOPE RELATIONSHIPS
The relations between words in certain sentences. Movement operation serves to
disambiguate the scope relations in a given sentence: He didn’t fail one of the students (“not”
has scope over “one”) VS One of the students, he didn’t fail (“one” has scope over “not”).