page_title: Locality (linguistics)
section_title: Raising to Subject: Surface and Underlying Tree Structure
hierarchical_section_title: Locality (linguistics) / Where locality is observed / Movement / Raising to Subject: Surface and Underlying Tree Structure
caption_attribution_description: English: underlying structure without movement
context_page_description: In linguistics, locality refers to the proximity of elements in a linguistic structure. Constraints on locality limit the span over which rules can apply to a particular structure. Theories of transformational grammar use syntactic locality constraints to explain restrictions on argument selection, syntactic binding, and syntactic movement.
context_section_description: When comparing surface structure to what selection predicts, there appears to be an anomaly in the word order of the sentence and the production of the tree. Within the underlying structure, at times referred to as deep structure, there exist Deep Grammatical Relations, which relate to the manifestation of subject, object and indirect object. Deep grammatical relations are mapped onto the underlying structure, (deep structure). These are expressed configurationally in relevance to particular languages, and are seen represented in the surface representation of the syntactic tree. This surface representation is motivated by selection, locality, and item specific features which allow for movement of syntactic items.
  Take for example the following sentence:
  [DP He] [VP seems] to[VP run] slowly
  Given the word order of the sentence, we would expect the tree to have violated Locality of Selection and Projection Principle guidelines. Projection Principle specifies what the head selects for, and Locality of selection ensures that these are established in the local domain of the head which selects it.
  As such, we would expect the following ungrammatical tree: 
  This tree represents local dependencies of selection. [VP run] selecs for a DP subject and can have an AdvP complement, this is satisfied. However, [VP seems] also requires a DP subject, which is unsatisfied. Lastly, T has an EPP feature, as discussed above, which selects for a DP subject. It's these selectional properties which motivate movement of certain syntactic items. In this particular tree, it is the DP which is motivated to move, in order to satisfy the selectional properties of [VP seems] and T's EPP feature.
  The following surface tree is expected, which follows the word order of the sentence provided: 
  In the surface representation, we see that DP movement is motivated by Locality of selection, movement is  marked by brackets <>, (or at times arrows following the movement). The movement leaves behind a trace of the DP which still satisfies selection, however, the selection is now a non-local dependency.
caption: *Seems he runs slowly
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