Abstract:
The role of the Projection Principle within Chomsky's Government-Binding
(GB) Theory is to preserve the subcategorisation properties of lexical items at
all levels of syntactic representation, viz. D-structure, S-structure, and Lexical
Form. Arguments have been made that the Projection Principle is a new
concept that is simply an extension of theTransformational Component (XFM)
and Emonds' Structure-Preserving Constraint (SPC), and that it does not
deserve the high status it has been accorded in GB theory. This paper
provides evidence, based on sentences involving movement operations, that
the Projection Principle is innovative and that it convincingly addresses what
theXFMandSPChave failed to address.
