Movement Rules Revisited

The Praguian approach to formal description of language (in detail, see Sgall et aI. 1986), works with dependency syntax and includes the topicfocus articulation into the (underlying, tectogrammatical) syntactic representations of sentences, using the left-to-right order of the nodes of the dependency tree for that purpose. The edges of the tree denote the dependency relations and the nodes carry complex labels indicating their lexical and morphological values (e.g. Preterite). No nonterminals and no nodes corresponding to function words (auxiliaries, prepositions, conjunctions, articles) are present in the tree. Counterparts of function words (and function morphemes) are parts of the complex symbols of the nodes. Instead of using the notion of phrase, we work with subtrees (i.e. the governor and its dependents, or all its subordinate nodes, where "subordinate" is the transitive closure of "dependent"). The present paper concentrates on a motivating discussion pointing out the reasons for distinguishing three layers of the order of lexical occurrences (Sect. 1), presenting a characterization of movement rules (Sect. 2), discussing certain relevant relationships between the level of syntax and that of morphernics (Sect. 3), and sketching a possibility how to proceed from surface (morphemics) to (underlying) syntax (Sect. 4). A way how to formalize the description of (underlying) syntactic slructure is briefly outlined in Section 5. 1. Three layers of word o rder