Property Delay (Remarks on "Phase Extension" by Marcel den Dikken)
David Pesetsky
January 2007 

A solicited commentary on the paper "Phase extension: Contours of a theory of the role of head movement in phrasal extraction" by Marcel den Dikken. Den Dikken's paper argued that movement of a phase-head H to a head X extends the phase, so that HP is no longer phasal, but XP is. This commentary "unpacks" this idea into what are argued to be separable component parts. One of these parts is "property delay". I suggest that head movement does show "property delay" for certain properties, but that the property of building a phase might not be one of them. I suggest (building on Fox & Pesetsky's theory of Cyclic Linearization) that what really "travels with" a phase head when it moves might be the property of licensing A-bar movement.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/000384 (please use that when you cite this article, unless you want to cite the full url: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000384)
Published in:	Theoretical Linguistics (forthcoming)
keywords:	phase, phase extension, a-movement, a-bar movement, cyclic linearization, object shift, scandinavian, den dikken, locative inversion, predicate inversion, syntax
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