Grammatical theories all use in one form or another the concept of canonical position of a
phrase. If this notion is used in the syntax, when comparing the two sentences:(la) John will
see Bill.(1 b) Bill John will see. we say that Bill occupies its canonical position in (la) but not
in (lb). Adopting the terminology of the Extended Standard Theory, we can think of the
canonical position of a phrase as its D-structure position. Since the concept of canonical
position is available, it becomes legitimate to ask of each syntactic unit in a given sentence …