Syntactic Derivations

This study investigates a model of syntactic derivations that is based on a new concept of dislocation, i.e., of 'movement' phenomena. Derivations are conceived of as a compositional process that constructs larger syntactic units out of smaller ones without any phrase-structure representations, as in categorial grammars. It is shown that a simple extension of this view can account for dislocation without gap features, chains, or structural transformations, and for many basic generalizations that transformational theories express in terms of X-bar-Theory and various constraints on movement.