Constituency in Deletion and Movement Remarks on Lechner (2001)

I have argued that the assumption of incremental left-to-right syntactic structure-building can explain a number of otherwise puzzling contrasts in the results of syntactic constituency tests, such as coordination, binding, movement and deletion (Phillips, 1996, 2003). Briefly, non-root merger in a left-to-right derivation leads to systematic changes in constituency over the course of the derivation. Since different syntactic tests apply at different stages in the derivation – due to their linear order properties – they see different ‘snapshots’ of the constituent structure of the sentence. This derivational perspective can explain why different structural tests yield apparently conflicting results, and can also predict which constituents each individual structural test should be able to access.