Presenter:
A crucial task for linguistics is to determine what syntactic operations are made possible by the human capacity for language. What are their properties, and why? One pervasive operation is movement: a phrase can move from one position in a sentence to another (“I wouldn’t invite those people” → “Those people, I wouldn’t invite”). The presenter argues that movement is subject to a previously undiscovered restriction: if a phrase X is buried within the edge of a Major Domain (roughly, a grammatically important chunk of structure), X can move only if it crosses a certain minimum distance. The session concludes by considering what this restriction reveals about the underlying architecture of syntax in human language.