Introduction Derivation or Representation?

Abstract

Derivation and Representation — these keywords refer both to a conceptual as well as to an empirical issue. Transformational grammar was in its outset (Chomsky 1957, 1975) a derivational theory which characterized a well-formed sentence by its derivation, i.e. a set of syntactic representations defined by a set of rules that map one representation into another. The set of mapping-rules, the transformations, eventually became more and more abstract and were trivialized into a single one, namely “move α ”, a general movement-rule. The constraints on movement were singled out in systems of principles that apply to the resulting representations, i.e. the configurations containing a moved element and its extraction site, the trace. The introduction of trace-theory (cf. Chomsky 1977, ch. 3 §17, ch.4) in principle opened up the possibility of completely abandoning movement and generating the possible outputs of movement directly, i.e. as structures that contain gaps representing the extraction sites. However, this is only a conceptual shift whereby the concept of movement is replaced by the concept of assigning a set of representations to a given expression. These representations characterize the properties of an expression on various levels together with a set of constraints that specify the possible relations between these levels. Thus, the crucial empirical issue is not the dichotomy of derivation by movement vs. assignment of representations but rather the question of how many different levels of representation are available.