The Syntax of Givenness Ivona Kucerová

given counterpart, and (ii) why is one instance of G-movement sometimes sufficient but
more than one instance of G-movement is required other times. I will leave the questions
open for now and I will come back to them in chapter 4.
In this section, I have provided two arguments that G-movement is a last resort syntactic
operation. The arguments were based on two facts about the distribution of pronouns in
Czech. First, I have shown that pronouns do not undergo G-movement. I have suggested
that this shows that G-movement applies only to elements that are to be interpreted as given
but that at the same time do not enter the derivation lexically marked as given. The second
part of this section addressed the question of what happens if an element cannot undergo G-
movement because of independent syntactic restrictions on movement, such as islands. We
have observed that in such configurations an element must already come from the lexicon
marked as given because there is no other way it could be marked as given in syntax. Last,
we have seen that if an element is trapped within an island but high enough in the structure,
the fact that it cannot undergo movement does not matter because the relevant interpretation
can be obtained without movement. Thus G-movement is not required.
1.6 Summary
In this chapter, I have offered several generalizations about the distribution of given and
new information in a Czech clause. I have shown that in an optimal configuration, the
given part linearly precedes the new part and the partition is marked by a verb which can
be on either side of the partition. I have proposed to account for the linear order facts in
terms of G-movement: an economy restricted movement that requires a given element to
move only if such an element is asymmetrically c-commanded by a new element and is not
lexically marked as given. I have presented several arguments in favor of understanding G-
movement as a last resort operation, including arguments from the distribution of pronouns
and the semantic ambiguity of certain strings. We have also seen that elements that are
lexically given do not undergo G-movement and that the linear partition between given and
new is not always perfect. In chapters 2 and 3 I will develop the current toy system in detail.
After that, in chapter 4, I will refine my answer to the question of how G-movement is
motivated and how it is treated by the interfaces. In particular, I will argue that G-movement
is a free syntactic movement, the purpose of which is to create a configuration which can be
semantically interpreted in a way that is required by the contextually established common
ground.
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