Movement paradoxes are not paradoxes: A raising approach

Non-nominal complements display peculiar patterns with regard to movement: movement of a non-nominal complement turns an ungrammatical sentence into a grammatical one and vice versa in many cases. The phenomenon, which Bresnan (2001), refers to as a movement paradox, is often used to refute the transformational approach. However, the present study explores the possibility of explaining the movement paradoxes, while maintaining that the dislocated constituents and their gap are related via topicalization. After critically reviewing the base-generation approach proposed by Koster (1978), and Alrenga (2005), this article provides a new approach—the raising approach augmented with a theory of Topic Phrase. According to the raising approach, Topic Phrase consists of a null topic head and its complement, and the former turns a non-nominal into a nominal and triggers topicalization, since it has two important features—[+nominal] and [+topic]. In short, I make two major claims in this article: (i) Topic Phrases, including clausal Topic Phrases, are nominals, and (ii) they must undergo topicalization, which follows from the fact that (i) topics must be referential and (ii) they must be mentioned first. This article shows that movement paradoxes are not paradoxes, since this raising analysis explains all four types of movement paradoxes.