This book proposes a novel, interface-based analysis of patterns of wh-movement in English in which constraints are stated over both syntactic and semantic representations. Firstly, a theory is presented of the internal structure of events as perceptual and cognitive units. The key question concerns the circumstances in which multiple smaller events, or subevents, can be perceived as jointly forming a single macroevent. Macroevent formation is possible if the subevents in question are perceived as related by one of two contingent relations, namely direct causation and enablement, where the lat ... More

This book proposes a novel, interface-based analysis of patterns of wh-movement in English in which constraints are stated over both syntactic and semantic representations. Firstly, a theory is presented of the internal structure of events as perceptual and cognitive units. The key question concerns the circumstances in which multiple smaller events, or subevents, can be perceived as jointly forming a single macroevent. Macroevent formation is possible if the subevents in question are perceived as related by one of two contingent relations, namely direct causation and enablement, where the latter is a relation holding among events that form part of an agent's plan. There is no single phrase-structural configuration which corresponds to enablement, so cognitive and semantic representations of event structure differ from syntactic representations of phrase structure in nontrivial ways. Certain patterns of extraction from adjuncts in English are amenable to simple descriptions stated over event-structural units and relations, but exhibit substantial differences from the patterns typically described by syntactic theories of locality. However, syntactic locality theories, as elaborated over the past 50 years, remain essential to an accurate description of the distribution of movement relations. The central challenge addressed by this work is therefore to allow syntactic and nonsyntactic factors to act jointly to constrain the syntactic operation of wh-movement without vitiating necessary assumptions about the modularity of the language faculty.