Movement to the Higher V Is Remnant Movement
- Movement to the Higher V Is Remnant Movement
Boeckx and Stjepanović (2001) claim to have evidence from the analysis of pseudogapping that head movement is best viewed as occurring, not in the overt syntax, but in the PF component. In this squib I will show that all of the movements that are needed in the analysis of pseudogapping are phrasal, hence that the analysis of pseudogapping says nothing about the place of head movement in the grammar.1
Boeckx and Stjepanović's evidence is based on Lasnik's (1995) analysis of pseudogapping, exemplified in (1).
(1) Although I wouldn't give books to Sally, I would -- magazines.
In Lasnik's analysis the constituent left behind by pseudogapping (magazines in (1)) has been moved to the specifier of an Agr position between V0 and V1, yielding the structure in (2). The argument for head movement of V1 to V0 is this: assuming leftward movement of the object, the verb, when it does not elide as part of V"1, must come to precede the object, and movement of the verb into this higher empty V position accomplishes this.
Boeckx and Stjepanović argue that such head movement of V1 to V0 must occur at PF, after Spell-Out. Applying head movement at PF would also remove problems with the ordering of components in the grammar; assuming that ellipsis occurs at PF, ellipsis of V"1 would have to be allowed to bleed movement of V1 to V0. However, it is assumed that PF branches off from the syntactic computation, and that this branching off makes it impossible to apply syntactic computation after PF. Applying verb movement to the higher empty V position as [End Page 653]
(2)
a PF operation would allow PF operations to apply in a single block, independent of the syntactic computation.
Therefore, movement of the V is motivated by the fact that, by assuming leftward movement of the ellipsis remnant, if ellipsis does not occur, the V must come to precede the constituent that would have been the ellipsis remnant. Leftward movement of the V to a position before the object would accomplish this.
If we take as our diagnostic for verb movement the appearance of the verb before the potential ellipsis remnant (the object) in the [End Page 654] unelided version of the sentence, we are led to conclude that (a) more than just Vs move to this position, and (b) the movement of the element is not head movement, but movement of a phrasal category-that is, a case of remnant movement in the sense of Den Besten and Webelhuth (1990).
To illustrate the first point, that more than Vs move, consider (3) and (4), in which pseudogapping applies to an adjective.
(3)
a. Although he isn't fond of Sally, he is -- of Martha.
b. He is fond of Martha.
(4)
a. Although he isn't partial to vanilla, he is -- to chocolate.
b. He is partial to chocolate.
By parity of reasoning with Lasnik's analysis of pseudogapping, the possibility of pseudogapping an adjective, as exemplified in (3a) and (4a), would imply that the structure of, say, (3b) would be along the lines of (5).
(5) He is [A"[A'[A fond]i [Agr"[P" of Martha] [Agr'[Agr[A"[A'[A t]i]]]]]]].
In other words, if Lasnik's analysis of pseudogapping forces us to assume a higher empty V position, to which transitive verbs raise, as in (2), there must be an analogous higher empty adjective position, to which transitive adjectives raise, and PP complements of adjectives must raise out of the APs in which they are presumably generated.2 This extension to adjectives would, as far as I can see, not trouble the conclusions of Boeckx and Stjepanović, since it should be no more difficult to find a PF account of adjective raising than it is to find a PF account of verb raising in their system.
More troubling to Boeckx and Stjepanović's account of the verb movement to the higher empty V position is point (b), that the movement must be phrasal. This can be shown...
