So let’s talk about islands. When you’re trying to solve a mystery, like “Who are
The Others?” or “What’s up with that Smoke Monster?”, it’s easy enough to summon
one of those “wh-words” to the beginning of whichever question you need to ask. Even
if it’s all the way down at the end, that “why” or “when” can always just hop
on a plane and be at your service in no time at all! But what happens when that word crashes
and gets stranded on an desert island? Can you still find the answers you’re looking
for? I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is The Ling Space.
One way of thinking about how we build our questions is this: we start out with a normal,
everyday, declarative statement, stick in some question-y word like “who” or ”what”,
and then move that word over to the front of the sentence. In our episode about movement
and traces, we covered some of the reasons why we think this is the right way to talk
about what’s going on, at least in languages like English.
But in the 1960s, we started to realize that this doesn’t always work. It turns out that
sometimes, when we put a question word into a sentence, it gets stuck. Like, take the
sentence “You might wonder when Jack will see Kate again”. If we tried to rework this
proclamation of potential puzzlement into a full-fledged question, say about who Jack
will see again, we get “Who might you wonder when Jack will see again?”, which sounds super weird.
It’s like, sometimes, the words we put into a sentence end up on these islands that they
just can’t get off of, no matter how hard they try; like they’re surrounded by water,
without any rescue in sight.
So as soon as these patterns got discovered, syntacticians started working on explaining
why words get stuck in all the places they do. And before long, linguist Noam Chomsky
formulated the Principle of Subjacency, which we touched on in our Principles & Parameters
episode. The Principle of Subjacency proposed that there were these barriers to movement
sitting around in our sentences, and that words only have enough strength to climb past
one of them. And one of these barriers is what we’ve been labeling as “IP”, or
“Inflectional Phrase” in our syntax trees. Basically, the parts of sentences that represent full clauses.
Let’s take a look at how this works. Starting with “Dynamite could stop The Monster!”,
we can see that if we want to turn this sentence into a question, we only have to do two things:
replace “The Monster” with “what”, and then move it to the front to get “What
could dynamite stop?”.
It works because that “what” only has to make it past one IP node. But as soon as
we introduce another one into the mix, escape becomes impossible! If we try to turn "We
should ask how the fence will stop The Monster” into a question, we’re left with “What
should we ask how the fence will stop?”. You can see that that “what” just doesn’t
have what it takes to cross over both IPs without ruining the whole sentence; there’s
simply one too many fences in the way.
So, that seems like a pretty good explanation of what’s going on! Except, not really.
The problem is, it’s actually pretty easy to come up with examples where wh-words can
cross over a whole bunch of these nodes. Like, “what” gets past 3 IPs in a sentence like
“What does Ben think Juliet believes Sawyer knew?” In fact, there doesn’t seem to
be any upper limit to how many clauses a word can escape from!
So that means on one hand, we have this great way of explaining why some questions just
can’t be asked; but on the other, it seems to contradict the data. And that’s definitely
bad. So, what can we do? Well, one solution is to say that when words move around in a
sentence, they don’t do it in one, giant leap. Instead, they make a lot of little skips
and jumps, like stepping stones to get across a pond.
To see how this works for us, just look at how the word “what” starts at the end
of our sentence, incrementally making its way up to the front. And at each stage, we
have a grammatical English question.
So here, nothing ever gets in the way of our word as it makes its way to the beginning
of the sentence. But if something does get in the way? Well, that’s when our word gets
stuck. Back in the sentence “We should ask how the fence will stop The Monster”, if
we turn that last noun phrase into a “what” and try to move it anywhere, the “how”
that comes before it gets in the way! It’s perched on the very stone that “what”
needs to make it across the pond without getting soaked! So “what” can’t move out at all.
The idea that words move in these small, successive cycles lets us hang onto our explanation of
why sometimes, these wh-words get trapped, without losing important data. When there’s
another “who” or ”what” or “where” at the front of the clause it’s trying to
climb out of, it’s like the exit to the escape hatch is blocked, and it just has to
stay down there. And this explains why sometimes even words close to the front of the sentence
can’t get any further. If we try to turn “The man who built the cabin is long gone”
into a question by moving something out of that relative clause, we get “What is the
man who built long gone?” That “who” at the top just won’t let anything sneak past it!
The possibility that operations like movement happen only over short distances has actually
become a really important part of modern syntactic theory. If you think back to our very first
episode on movement, we talked about how French verbs are a lot closer to the beginning of
the sentence than English verbs, since they tend to appear before adverbs and negation
instead of after.
In "Tu connais pas Rousseau”, or “you don’t know Rousseau”, we can suppose that
the verb “connais” can show up before the negation “pas” because it has enough
strength to move out of its home verb phrase, past "pas", and into a higher position in the tree.
This is why, when we want to turn the sentence into a question, it’s in exactly the right
spot to be moved even further to the front, as in “Connais-tu pas Rousseau?”.
As it turns out, the reason we can’t say “know you not Rousseau” in English is
that most verbs can’t even make it past negation, and aren’t ever close enough to
the front to make it all the way there. Since movement must be local, they’re stuck. The
only verbs that have it in them to make it that far are auxiliaries like “have” and
“be”. That’s why we can say “Have you not met Rousseau?” or “Are you not
familiar with Rousseau?”.
Just like wh-words, it looks like verbs can’t travel long distances without a few stopovers.
And when something’s blocking them, that’s it — they’re trapped.
And, so, what look like two totally unrelated happenings actually both fall under the purview
of the same basic principle: the Minimal Link Condition, which says that when you’re moving
around in a sentence, you have to move to the closest potential landing site, before
continuing along on your journey. Since it turns out this explains subjacency while explaining
some other stuff too, subjacency can comfortably be replaced. Oh, by the way, guess who proposed
the Minimal Link Condition? That’s right, still Chomsky.
Looking back at the long-distance movement of wh-words, we actually have pretty strong
evidence that this is really how it all works. In child speech, for example, we find sentences
like “Who do you think who the cat chased?”, where that “who” is showing up both at
its final destination and in the spot it landed in to refuel. And in adult speech, we see
multiple copies of wh-phrases showing up in languages like Afrikaans and German, too — exactly
where we’d expect to see them stopping off on their way to the front!
Finally, and most surprisingly, we even see these effects in languages like Japanese,
which don’t move their question words around at all. Look at “Dare-ni doko-de atta ka
oboete-iru no”, or “Do you remember who we met where”. We’ve got two wh-words
inside the embedded clause competing to get out, but interpreting it to mean “Who do
you remember where we met?” is just as impossible as the English sentence.
The fact that this meaning is blocked suggests that even when we don’t hear it happening,
wh-words need to be able to move around freely in a sentence, to get certain meanings out.
The Minimal Link Condition even applies to this sort of invisible, covert movement of
words and phrases, too!
It looks like when words take a trip, they always make sure to plan for breaks along
the way; if they didn’t, they’d almost certainly end up on an island somewhere, totally lost!
So, we’ve reached the end of The Ling Space for this week. If you managed to find your
way off the island, you learned that moving things around in a sentence doesn’t always
go as planned; that words like “who” and “what”, and even verbs, need to break
up their long journeys into more manageable pieces; and that the Minimal Link Condition
explains how we form our sentences, in both English and in other languages!
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman, and directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost. This
week’s episode was written by Stephan Hurtubise. Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our music
is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE. We’re down in the comments
below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our website, where we’ll have some
extra material on this topic.
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And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Gihin ennam!