Ways of smuggling in syntactic derivations

This chapter presents and discusses a number of derivations such as passive, causative, and passive in the causative voice / si-causative passive, which all involve movement of a chunk of the verb phrase containing the verb and its internal argument, yielding smuggling in Collins’s (2005) sense. The questions of what the engine of a smuggling derivation is and how the relevant chunk to be smuggled is identified guide the discussion. Evidence from acquisition is also considered where derivations involving smuggling appear to be at the same time more complex and more readily available to the developing child. The relevant chunks can be attracted by different types of heads in the clause structure, which all have the property of attracting syntactic movement into their specifier. Such heads may express features of different nature present in the clausal map, such as the passive and causative voice, as well as discourse-related features such as the (vP-peripheral) topic and focus features.