Unifying Long Head Movement with Phrasal Movement: A New Argument from Spellout
Karlos Arregi, Asia Pietraszko
December 2020 

Based on V-fronting in Breton, we present a new argument for unifying Long Head Movement (LHM) with phrasal movement as the same operation (Move or Internal Merge). The argument comes from the spellout of movement chains: V-fronting in Breton (an instance of LHM) exhibits the same three spellout options as VP-fronting crosslinguiatically: i) deletion of the clause-internal copy, ii) clause-internal do-support and iii) verb doubling. Although this parallel supports the unification of LHM and phrasal movement, we argue that it does not support conflating head and phrasal movement more generally. Instead, the spellout evidence tells us that, while LHM and phrasal movement are the same operation, traditional local head movement is a different operation. This in turn means that local head movement and LHM must be distinct operations, as proposed in Hein 2018, Harizanov & Gribanova 2019, and Arregi & Pietraszko, to appear.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005264 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of WCCFL 38
keywords:	long head movement, v(p)-fronting, do-support, doubling, ontology of movement operations, breton, morphology, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [June 2020]
Downloaded:	322 times

 

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