Less Movement is More Minimalist Movement

Abstract

This paper explores aspects of movement under minimalism. Taking wh-movement as a point of departure, standard assumptions about the mechanics of movement are subjected to critical scrutiny. It is argued that intermediate copies are unmotivated and a multiattachment alternative to successive-cylic movement is proposed. While the syntactic part of movement reduces to the linking of a probe feature to a matching goal feature, it is shown that this operation per se is unbounded and that locality requirements are instead introduced through Spell–Out to PF. It is also argued that all apparent successive-cylic effects—such as the pronunciation of lower whcopies— are head rather than phrasal effects because they derive from the intervention of heads in the Spell–Out process. Extending the approach to A-movement, it is suggested that pronominal clitics under doubling and the pronominal portion of bipartite reflexives can be similarly treated as the realization of case and φ features on an intervening head.