Illicit NP Movement: Locality Conditions on Chains? 1985

Abstract

One of the major syntactic discoveries of the early 1970s was that in certain central respects, NP movement obeys the same constraints as the process associating an anaphor with its antecedent. Chomsky (1973) proposed that this fact is simply a special case of the generalization that all rules obey the Tensed-S Condition and the Specified Subject Condition. The significance of such an approach was that it allowed for a great reduction in the descriptive power of transformations, leading ultimately to the current “Move a.” (1) and (2) are representative examples of illicit reflexive binding and movement, respectively.