Proposal for Volume on Smuggling

Proposal for Volume on Smuggling

Editors:            Adriana Belletti, Chris Collins

Publisher:        Oxford University Press

         Since the beginning of generative grammar, displacement has been identified as a characteristic property of human languages: a constituent (e.g., a DP) is interpreted only in part in the position in which it is pronounced, in part it is interpreted in the position where it is first merged (and assigned its theta-role in the case of a DP). Displacement occurs in different guises, as A, A' and head-movement.

         Sometimes, movement can affect a chunk of clause structure that is attracted by some feature to a higher position. From the landing site of the large chunk, movement can further affect a constituent contained in it. This is the process referred to as smuggling (a term coined by Collins 2005). Looked at in this way, smuggling is a kind of movement interaction, where one movement operation precedes another of a certain type. Other kinds of movement interactions include remnant movement, successive cyclic movement, crossing paths nested paths.

As shown in Collins 2005, an effect of smuggling is the possibility of circumventing locality constraints on movement (e.g., Relativized Minimality). He argues that in the case of the passive, a verbal chunk containing the object is moved over the in-situ external argument, circumventing a violation of locality.

            Cases of smuggling have already been proposed for the derivation of passive, double object constructions and causatives, all of which involve A-movement. However, there is no principled reason why the process should only make reference to A-movement, giving rise to the expectation that we will find cases of smuggling also in the domain of A’-movement and head movement. For example, suppose that movement of a wh-phrase with a feature [+wh] to the matrix Spec CP position is blocked by some constraint. Is it possible for the movement to proceed via some other non-blocked derivation?

            This volume will explore the following questions:

a. What is the full range of smuggling phenomena, including A’-movement, A-movement and               head-movement?

b. Smuggling derivations sometimes involve violations of Freezing, a constraint that prohibits extraction from a moved constituent. What is the status of the Freezing constraint in UG?

c.  What other strategies are available for circumventing locality constraints? How does smuggling fit into a general theory of circumventing locality constraints?

d.  How are smuggling derivations acquired by children?

e. What is the status of smuggling in a bare phrase structure grammar in which the                          the labeling algorithm (Chomsky 2013) operates?