A Minimalist Account Of Adjunct Movement In English

The peculiarities of wh-adjuncts, as opposed to other wh-phrases, have attracted a great deal of attention in the literature (Huang 1982, Lasnik and Saito 1984, Rizzi 2000, Ishii 2004 to name a few). To our best knowledge, the core issue about the adjunct movement in GB is the government of wh-trace. However, researches of the wh-adjunct movement in the light of trace theory are not convincing enough. This study is an attempt to gain insight into the movement of adjunct in English under the Minimalist Program (MP).We reviewed two kinds of locality conditions on adjunct movement in terms of trace theory under the framework of Government and Binding theory (GB). The first is the Subjacency-based account, which can constrict the distance of adjunct movement in English, but it cannot explain the different extraction acceptability between wh-adjunct and other wh-phrases. The second is the Empty Category Principle (ECP)-based account. This approach requires separate domain for its application to wh-adjuncts and other wh-phrases, which in turn weakens the analytical power of ECP. So, explaining the wh-adjunct movement under the framework of the Government and Binding theory (GB) has its own limitations.Under the framework of the Minimalist Program, the notion of trace and the ECP do not exist. The explaination of adjunct movement mainly relies on the copy theory of movement, according to which a moved element leaves behind a copy of itself, rather than a trace. Ishii(2004)conducted an approach to explain the grammaticality of adjunct movement across overt complementizer on the basis of Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC). It seems that approach is more insightful in interpreting the wh-adjunct movement. However, it escapes the problem caused by that which is the central issue posed for adjunct movement within the framework of GB.Contrary to researches (Rizzi 1990, Ishii 2004, Watanable 1993 and Browning 1996) that believe the wh-word directly merges at the specifier of the embedded CP, this thesis claims that adjuncts are merged in the vP phase which represents a complete thematic complex. Meanwhile, this thesis reveals the difference between phrasal adjuncts and sentential adjuncts.Bo?kovi?'s explanation (2011) of that-trace effect sheds light on our investigation of wh-adjunct movement in English. In line with the CP Recursion analysis, we assume that complementizer is generated in the lower CP and marked the trouble-maker feature *, but after it is copy-moved to the higher CP, it lost the intervention effect for wh-adjunct movement because traces do not count as interveners for relativized minimality effects.Applying the newly proposal of adjunct merge position, this thesis reanalyzes the adjunct movement in English. The significance of this present thesis is that it proposes a tentative analysis of adjunct movement in terms of copy theory.