Agreement and Head Movement: Clitics, Incorporation, and Defective Goals

6. Conclusions

6 Conclusions In the preceding chapters I have presented what I believe to be a conceptually natural and attractive account of head movement based on the central idea of minimal phases. If the theoretical and empirical arguments made here are correct, then head movement cannot and should not be eliminated from narrow syntax. This in turn implies that the recent proposals to replace certain cases of head movement with remnant movement and/or PF-movement (see the references given in section 1.3) should be reconsidered. Let us now look again at Chomsky’s (2001, 37–38) objections to head movement, taking them one by one. First, the Extension Condition: recall that Chomsky’s observation is that the derived structure of head movement violates this condition. I argued in section 3.2 that this does not need to be formulated as an independent condition in the system of Chomsky 2008, but that instead its e¤ects derive from Edge Features. In that case, as we have seen, some cases of head movement (essentially the A0 -type: predicate clefting and Breton LVM) satisfy it, while other types of head movement do not (those triggered by Agree and defectivity). This is just like what we find with XP-movement: A0 -movement is triggered by EF and therefore obeys the Extension Condition, while A-movement is not and does not. Second, Chomsky questioned the nature of the trigger for head movement . We have seen that this can be EF (again predicate clefts, LVM), or Agree. Again, head movement is just like XP-movement in this respect. Third, Chomsky pointed out that head movement was suspect as a core-syntactic operation since onward cyclic movement always involves ‘‘roll-up’’ (i.e., movement of the entire derived constituent formed by the previous step of movement) and is never successive-cyclic. Successivecyclic head movement is essentially excorporation, and we have seen that the system proposed here allows for this: see section 5.2. Note further that predicate clefting, to the extent that it can be long-distance, showing only standard island e¤ects, involves heads undergoing quite conventional successive-cyclic movement, and the same must be true in longdistance comparatives and free relatives like (1) if Donati’s analysis of these, summarized at the end of chapter 5, is correct: (1) a. I will visit what Fred said Bill thinks you will visit. b. Mary ate more candies than Fred said Bill thinks she did. Again, we observe that head movement does not di¤er from XPmovement . Fourth, Chomsky observes that the special and highly restrictive locality condition on head movement, the HMC, is suspect. But we have seen that the system put forward here requires no HMC, or indeed any special locality condition for head movement. Head movement is constrained by Agree and the PIC, just like XP-movement. Moreover, it is at least possible that there is an antilocality condition on head movement; see chapter 5, note 10. Fifth, Chomsky claims that head movement never a¤ects interpretation , and chapter 1 was devoted to showing that this claim is empirically false. As pointed out by Matushansky, however, head movement is rather like A-movement: frequently it has no e¤ect on interpretation, but if the right kind of element is moved (e.g., a modal verb/auxiliary in the case of head movement), scope and reconstruction e¤ects emerge, as do reconstruction and polarity-item licensing e¤ects under the right conditions. Once again, there seems to be no di¤erence of principle between head and XP-movement. Finally, Chomsky points out that some head-movement operations are sensitive to PF-notions such as second position, and that this may indicate that head movement may generally be a PF-phenomenon. We have seen however that this cannot be true across the board, given the results of chapter 1. It is certainly possible that some instances of head movement take place at PF (perhaps subject cliticization in Standard French, and see also the discussion of pseudogapping in chapter 4, note 20). The question of the nature of second-position e¤ects in general remains open. It may be that these are best accounted for syntactically by the combination of EF and incorporation, as suggested in section 3.3, although this is unclear. But these e¤ects do not, at least on their own, lead us to consider all instances of head movement as phonological. It is also quite possible that literal movement, in the sense...