Movement

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In syntax, movement is a process by which sentences end up spoken out loud in a different order than matches their underlying structure.

Generativist syntacticians say that sentences have a "deep structure" that adheres to universal grammar, but various language-specific constraints transform this into the "surface structure" when the sentence gets actually realized.

In English

For example, English has something called wh-movement: when we turn a sentence like Mary wants Bill to dance into a wh-question, we say Who does Mary want () to dance?

The generative explanation for this is that the question has a deep structure like Mary wants who to dance?, and then for pragmatic reasons, the question word moves to the front of the sentence and gets supported by "does". There is a trace marked by () in the spot where "who" moved from.

There is good evidence for these wh-traces. English speakers tend to agree that we can't contract the question to Who does Mary wanna dance? — we can imagine the wh-trace is there, unpronounced, but blocking the contraction.

Another example is inversion: in questions, auxiliary verbs move to the front of the sentence, like We should have told herShould we () have told her? Again, the trace blocks contraction: Should we've /wiːv/ told her? sounds wrong.

In Toaq

Toaq's word order is VSO (verb-subject-object), but the Kuna output for a sentence like Noaq jí kúe nha indicates an SVO deep structure: jí noaq kúe. What's going on?

The generativist "verb phrase" has the verb and the object generated side-by-side. Even in VSO natural languages like Irish, there is evidence for verb-and-object VP structures. Meanwhile, there is also some evidence for verb-and-object structures in Toaq: for example, prepositional phrases like tî kúa, or object-incorporating verbs like po.

A generativist approach for analyzing a VSO language is thus that the verb and object really are side-by-side in the deep structure, and that the verb moves up to the front of the sentence for some reason.[1]

A sentence with a serial verb, like Pu dıe tua sıq nháo jí máq, has a deep structure like Pu [nháo dıe [jí tua [sıq máq]]]. We say that there is an underlying Chinese-like nested SVO structure, but all verbs move to the tense ("V-to-T movement").

Toaq could have been designed as SVO from the start, and have a surface structure that's closer to the deep structure. There are aesthetic arguments in favor of VSO. For example, VSO grammar is similar to the logic notation   for predicates and their arguments.

Footnotes

  1. Hoemaı has suggested that there is "room for fanfic" as to why this happens in Toaq. Perhaps Noaq jí kúe nha originated as a cleft construction like Read it, I'll do that book! and then over time it got watered down and became normal grammar.