Movement to C 0

for-Movement to C

⁰ mulation of AGREE will be taken up later; but it should be clear from (88) that

it doesn’t match perfectly the condition we arrived at for Case assignment in the previous chapter. While the finite I⁰ does c-command the verb it assigns tense/agreement inflection to in (88), it is not klose to that verb: there is more than one phrase that dominates the verb but not I⁰. This would block Case as-signment. One desirable consequence of the formulation of AGREE is to make it account for the inability of a polarity item to stand between I⁰ and a main verb. That would be a natural place for this account to attempt an explanation for this fact.

If finite I⁰assigns inflectional morphology to a main verb that follows, then there are a couple ways of characterizing the different outcome with auxiliary verbs. One possibility is that auxiliary verbs are inflected in the same way, and that there is an independent reason that they must move to the I⁰ that assigns them their inflection. Another possibility is that auxiliary verbs are prevented from getting their inflectional morphology by way of AGREE, and instead make recourse to Verb Movement. Hopefully, a better understanding of what makes an auxiliary verb different from a main verb will help us un-derstand how to express the difference in how their inflection influences their surface position. We can learn something about this question by considering how these processes arise in other languages. We’ll look at other languages in the sections that follow, and then return to the question of how to give a pic-ture of the main verb/auxiliary verb distinction in English. But first, there is one last piece to the picture of English verb placement that we should see.

b. What should you eat?

In both of these types of questions, the contents of I⁰ has moved to some sentence-initial position. As a consequence of this rule’s targeting I⁰, only ma-terial which can stand in I⁰can move. Therefore, main verbs in English do not undergo this process, and instead the nearly meaningless auxiliary verb do is used.

(33) a. * Eat you pickles?

* Which pickles eat you?

b. Do you eat pickles?

Which pickles do you eat?

Where does I⁰ move to? The common answer to this question, based on work of the Dutch linguists Jan Koster and Hans den Besten,¹is that it is C⁰. The reason for this speculation is that the rule involved here seems to be in com-plementary distribution with complementizers. That is, its effects are blocked in those situations where we believe that complementizers are present in this position. Thus, there is a distinction between (34a) and (34b).

(34) a. Have you eaten?

b. * I remember (that) have you eaten.

c. Which pickles have you eaten?

d. * I remember that which pickles have you eaten.

Instead, Yes/No questions that are embedded are marked with a special com-plementizer: whether. And wh-questions in embedded contexts involve no ev-idence of a C⁰at all.

Under this view, the rule involved in these questions, then, might be for-mulated as in (35).

(35) I-to-C Movement Adjoin I⁰to C⁰.

The Word Criterion will correctly block movement of I⁰ to C⁰ in those cases where C⁰is filled with a complementizer, assuming that a complementizer and the modal or inflected verb in I⁰cannot together form one word.

Okay, so this is, roughly, a sketch of the rules that go into making up our knowledge of this fragment of English syntax. We’ve got three rules, one that

1 See den Besten (1983) and Koster (1975).

Movement to C

⁰ moves auxiliary verbs to I⁰, another than moves I⁰ to C⁰ and a third that

in-flects main verbs. The first and last are driven by the Stray Affix Filter, or some parallel condition on the view that inflection is assigned under AGREE, and the second arises in questions. Both are subject to the Word Criterion, which prevents I⁰, C⁰ or V⁰from combining whenever they cannot form a word.

There’s one last feature of these rules that we should consider. In all the cases so far examined, the V⁰ that moves to I⁰ is always the one that is closest to it. It appears that this is not just an accident of the examples we have chosen, instead it looks like it is a necessary feature of the verb movement rule. Con-sider, for example, how these rules might combine to apply to a representation like (36) below. Suppose that we move be to -en and form thereby the participle form: been. Imagine, further, that the I⁰which determines the present partici-ple, the I⁰ holding -ing, inflects the main verb that follows in whatever way it turns out that main verbs inflect. All that would then remain is to provide the tns/agree morphology associated with the highest I⁰ with a stem. The correct outcome is one in which have moves to this I⁰. But what would prevent the par-ticiple been, residing in the I⁰ directly beneath have, from moving into this I⁰. The outcome would be (36), and this is clearly not possible.

(37) * The been-re have running.

There’s not even an inflectional form for be in which agreement/tense inflec-tion combines with the (perfect) participle.

Similarly, consider how our rules might combine to apply to the D-structure representation like (38). In this example, we might imagine that, as before, the I⁰associated with -ing inflects the following main verb and that be moves into the I⁰ associated with -en and forms the participle: been. Let verb movement also bring have into the I⁰ associated with tense/agreement morphology to form the finite verb have. Finally, assume that this CP is a question and so triggers the rule that brings I⁰ into C⁰. We might imagine that the I⁰ holding been could move into C⁰; but this is not grammatical, as (39) indicates.

(36) IP NP

they

I

I

-agr/present VP

V

V

have

IP

I

I

-en

VP

V

V

be

IP

I

I

-ing

VP

V

V

run

(38) CP

C

C IP

they I

I

agr/tns

VP

V

V

have

IP

I

170

Verb Second word order

(39) * Been they have running?

There might well be independent reasons for some of these effects. It might be, for instance, that English morphology does not allow participles to inflect for tense and agreement. And yet, all of the blocked outcomes fit a generaliza-tion that it might be worthwhile crediting for the whole class of cases. Travis (1984) has made just such a proposal. She suggests that there is a constraint on movement rules that relocate X⁰s that blocks them from moving past other X⁰s. She calls this condition the “head movement constraint,” and I will for-mulate it as (40).²

(40) The Head Movement Constraint

No X⁰ may move past a Y⁰that c-commands it.

As we will see, this feature of the grammar of English verb placement can be assigned to Universal Grammar. The Head Movement Constraint seems to gov-ern instances of X⁰ Movement in other languages.