Whither Head Movement?
Nat Lang Linguist Theory (2019) 37:461–522 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-018-9420-5 Whither head movement? Boris Harizanov1 · Vera Gribanova1 Received: 14 February 2017 / Accepted: 20 April 2018 / Published online: 13 July 2018 © Springer Nature B.V. 2018 Abstract We argue that head movement, as an operation that builds head-adjunction structures in the syntax, has been used to model two empirically distinct classes of phenomena. One class has to do with displacement of heads (fully formed morpho- logical words) to higher syntactic positions, and includes phenomena like verb sec- ond and verb initiality. The other class has to do with the construction of complex morphological words and is involved in various types of word formation. Based on the very different clusters of properties associated with these two classes of phe- nomena, we argue that they each should be accounted for by distinct grammatical operations, applying in distinct modules of the grammar, rather than by the one tradi- tional syntactic head movement operation. We propose that the operation responsible for upward displacement of heads is genuine syntactic movement (Internal Merge) and has the properties of syntactic phrasal movement, including the ability to affect word order, the potential to give rise to interpretive effects, and the locality associated with Internal Merge. On the other hand, word formation is the result of postsyntactic amalgamation, realized as either Lowering (Embick and Noyer 2001) or its upward counterpart, Raising. This operation, we argue, has properties that are not associated with narrow syntax: it is morphologically driven, it results in word formation, it does not exhibit interpretive effects, and it has stricter locality conditions (the Head Move- ment Constraint).
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