Leftward Movement: New Development in Linguistic Subjectification

Leftward Movement is a newly developed hypothesis in linguistic subjectification theory. It points out that a subjectified element shows a strong syntactic tendency to move leftward, a mechanism of harmony between Semantic Adjacency Rule and First Come First Serve Principle. The leftward-moved elements are semantically more bleached and definite. Leftward Movement can give a systematic explanation to some traditional grammatical phenomena.