Dimensions of Movement: From Features to Remnants (review)

This volume explores various aspects of the displacement property of human language including fundamental questions concerning the types of movement (X⁰ vs. XP), the triggers for movement (feature checking vs. word order effects), the way feature movement is executed (move F vs. long-distance Agree), locality conditions on movement, and the component of syntax at which movement takes place (covert vs. overt movement).

Artemis Alexiadou and Elena Anagnostopoulou argue that na-subjunctive complements of aspectual verbs in Greek involve raising. The broader theoretical implications of this analysis concern agreement being the reflex of two different types of nominal feature checking associated with T(ense): Case checking in Greek and extended projection principle (EPP) checking in Portuguese and English. Piotr Bański considers present tense predicative adjectival constructions in Polish and establishes the relevance of prosodic diagnostics in distinguishing between phrasal movement and head movement. Sjef Barbiers’s contribution bears on the issue of what constituent can be a phase. He distinguishes two types of clausal complements, factives and propositional clauses, arguing that only the former contain force projection and are thus complete, hence phases. João Costa presents an array of diagnostics in favor of a scrambling analysis of VOS orders in European Portuguese, as opposed to the remnant movement of [_tp/vp t_Subj VO] analysis. Gisbert Fanselow criticizes a remnant movement approach to incomplete VP fronting in German. His alternative analysis, predicate raising, assumes that free constituent order is base-generated. Fanselow allows for the coexistence of (covert) feature checking and remnant movement.

Incomplete category fronting is also considered in Roland Hinterhözl, who argues for the availability of both partial deletion (as in PP-out-of-NP and discontinuous NPs) and remnant movement (as in restructuring contexts). The coexistence of those two operations is argued to be possible due to different conditions on application. Hilda Koopman’s contribution focuses on the gaps in the word order of verbal complexes and accounts for them in terms of complexity filters that are category sensitive and impose requirements on the size of the structure that dominates the overt material. Koopman’s system makes extensive use of overt (remnant) phrasal movement exclusively. Howard Lasnik puts forward an argument in favor of overt feature movement as opposed to long-distance Agree. The argument is built on the assumption concerning PF-deficiency of a constituent from which overt feature movement has taken place, where the strategies to repair PF-violation are pied-piping or deletion. Gereon Müller develops an optimality-theoretic unified account of two types of remnant movement: (1) scrambling + remnant VP preposing, and (2) negative NP preposing + remnant VP preposing. He argues that the differences between the two can be reduced to the fact that the former is a feature-driven movement whereas the latter is a repair strategy triggered by shape conservation. Masanori Nakamura proposes an analysis of null operator (NO) movement in terms of feature movement, which is a direct consequence of the morphological nature of NOs: the operator is nothing but a bundle of features. The parametric variation in NO movement follows if CED reduces to morphological properties of functional categories. Máire B. Noonan presents a novel analysis of an Irish preverbal particle aL in terms of iteration of argument shift operations of the CPs from which the wh-phrase is extracted. In her view, aL is not a complementizer but a morphological agreement reflex.

Finally, Ivy Sichel examines the properties of different types of movements (X⁰ vs. XP) operative in certain N-initial DPs in Hebrew. She follows the previous analyses of construct state nominals in terms of N⁰ movement but argues that attributive adjectival constructions involve pied-piping an NP/DP across an adjectival...