Linguistica (Dec 2002)
Verb movement and interrogatives
Abstract
Verb movement is a phenomenon that has been studied extensively withintheframework of Chomskyan generative grammar. The pioneering work by Pollock(1989) has been followed by a number of studies involving various languages, whichhas provided an important insight both into the language-specific andlanguage-universal properties of verb movement. In most general terms, verb movement canbedefined as movement of the verb from its base position in the (V)erb (P)hrase tosomeposition higher in the clausal structure. In Government & Binding theory verbmovement was motivated by the need of the bare lexical verb to associate with theinflectional affixes hosted by the functional heads (Pollock 1989, Belletti 1990). Bycontrast,the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995) claims that all types of movement aretrig gered by feature-checking requirements. In this system, items from lexical categories are fully inflected in the lexicon.Thus the verb is inserted into its base position with all its inflectional affixes and associated inflectional features. Functional heads donotcontain any inflectional material; they carry only abstract features, which arecheckedagainst the corresponding features on the lexical items. In order for feature-checkingto take place the lexical item (e.g. the verb) must raise to the relevantfunctionalhead(s).
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