Explaining the immobility of conjuncts*

Abstract

Abstract. This paper aims to explain the well‐observed constraint that no conjunct may move. It is claimed that, with respect to final conjuncts, this constraint simply manifests a morphological property of coordinators shared with many other types of head elements: they need to be adjacent to their complement, and thus neither deletion nor movement of their complement is possible. Final conjuncts therefore may not move. Based on the assumption that the categorial features of initial conjuncts are transferred to the coordinator and, it is claimed that this transference keeps initial conjuncts in situ, since elements without category‐features may not move overtly. This new account for the immobility of initial conjuncts is supported by two generalizations. Firstly, in the Chinese de construction, kernel elements may not move because they provide categorial features for de, which has no intrinsic categorial features and is the head of the whole complex. Secondly, in the comitative coordinate construction in Chinese, initial conjuncts may move because they do not provide categorial features for the coordinators, which have their own intrinsic categorial features. This paper specifies the semantic condition of initial conjunct movement: the coordination must be non‐distributive. This new account of the immobility of conjuncts suggests that the constraint is not a construction‐specific syntactic constraint. Instead, it is related to the lexical/morphological makeup of coordinators. Conjuncts as regular Spec and Complement elements may undergo syntactic movement. It has been generally assumed that movement is driven by morphological considerations. This study further shows that the blocking of movement can also be related to morphological properties of specific syntactic elements in addition to the generally recognized locality restrictions.