Subjacency

<p>Subjacency is a general syntactic <a href="/facts/Locality_(linguistics)/Jc34HKEH">locality</a> constraint on <a href="/facts/Syntactic_movement/H6Hkxacu">movement</a>. It specifies restrictions placed on movement and regards it as a strictly local process. This term was first defined by <a href="/facts/Noam_Chomsky/3rtpzlER">Noam Chomsky</a> in 1973 and constitutes the main concept of the <a href="/facts/Government_and_Binding_Theory/2DTpSetS">Government and Binding Theory</a>. The revised definition of subjacency from Chomsky (1977) is as follows: "A cyclic rule cannot move a phrase from position Y to position X (or conversely) in … X … [α… [β… Y … ] … ] … X …, where α and β are cyclic nodes. Cyclic nodes are S and NP", (where S=<a href="/facts/Sentence_(linguistics)/GhKKkcm2">Sentence</a> and NP=<a href="/facts/Noun_Phrase/mmz3tJt9">Noun Phrase</a>).
</p><p>This principle states that no movement can move an element over more than one bounding node at a time. In more recent frameworks, bounding nodes which are hurdles to movement are AgrP (<a href="/facts/Agreement_phrase/jgezemln">Agreement phrase</a>) and DP (<a href="/facts/Determiner_phrase/BIzVM7zt">Determiner phrase</a>) (S and NP in Chomsky’s definition respectively). Therefore, Subjacency condition limits movement by defining bounding nodes. It also accounts for the fact that all movements are local.
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Subjacency open-in-new

Subjacency