Movement, Locality and Cartography.

 Determining the formal properties of movement has always been a crucial domain of syntactic research; recently, the attempt has been made, within Minimalism,  to connect the empirical discovery of the properties of movement with a deeper reflection on the nature and causes of the phenomenon.  In this course I will illustrate an approach to movement inspired by minimalist guidelines and based on the cartography of syntactic structures, the attempt to draw maps as precise and detailed as possible of syntactic configurations.

A comprehensive formal theory of movement must include

1. locality principles, determining the maximal structural space which movement can cover;
2. delimiting principles, determining under what conditions movement can start, and must stop.

I will give e general overview of the issues, and then will focus on locality and delimitation, with special reference to the cases which force a movement chain to stop and pass the representation on to the interpretive systems.