Edge Features on Phase Heads or Moving Elements?

Abstract

Building on work by Chomsky (2000, 2001) and Bošković (2007), this paper discusses how successive cyclic movement is to be triggered and constrained. Modifying a proposal by Nunes (2014), I argue that the features that trigger successive cyclic movement (edge features) may be lexically encoded on phase heads or on elements that may undergo movement and that this difference is responsible for much of the crosslinguistic variation involving wh-movement.