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Part of
The Unity of Movement: Evidence from verb movement in Cantonese
Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 283] 2024
► pp. 25–96

Chapter 3
Intervention effects

Verb movement to peripheral positions

This chapter examines potential intervening elements in head movement by investigating four cases of non-local verb displacement in Cantonese. In these cases, the verbs are doubled, and their copy appears in the initial or final position of the sentence. I propose that these four cases uniformly involve head movement to a specifier position in the CP periphery, in a way identical to their phrasal counterparts. I further argue that elements of the same structural types (i.e., heads/verbs) do not necessarily block the proposed movement; instead, elements that possess the same syntactic feature are genuine interveners. The findings in the chapter challenge the status of the Head Movement Constraint as a general constraint on head movement. At the same time, I show that the proposed head movement exhibits the syntactic intervention effects that are observed with phrasal movement. I conclude that head movement is not constrained in a way different from phrasal movement with regard to intervention. Particularly, intervention effects are calculated in terms of syntactic features but not structural types. This conclusion necessitates a movement theory that does not distinguish head movement from phrasal movement in terms of locality.
Article outline
  • 3.1Introduction
  • 3.2Intervention effects and head movement
    • 3.2.1Intervention due to identical structural types
    • 3.2.2The particular nature of the HMC and exceptions to the HMC
    • 3.2.3Base generation and remnant movement as alternatives
    • 3.2.4Interim summary
  • 3.3Verb doubling constructions and discourse effects
    • 3.3.1Types of verbs
    • 3.3.2Morpho-syntactic properties and variants
      • 3.3.2.1Topic constructions of verbs
      • 3.3.2.2‘Even’-focus constructions of verbs
      • 3.3.2.3Copula focus constructions of verbs
      • 3.3.2.4Dislocation copying of verbs
      • 3.3.2.5Interim summary
    • 3.3.3Discourse effects
      • 3.3.3.1Contrastive verbal topics
      • 3.3.3.2Additive verbal foci
      • 3.3.3.3Exhaustive verbal foci
      • 3.3.3.4Defocused verbs
      • 3.3.3.5Interim summary
  • 3.4Evidence for verb movement
    • 3.4.1Lexical identity effects
    • 3.4.2Island effects
      • 3.4.2.1Island sensitivity
      • 3.4.2.2Long-distance/Cross-clausal dependencies
      • 3.4.2.3Interim summary
    • 3.4.3Idiomatic expressions
  • 3.5Focus Intervention Effects
    • 3.5.1No intervention by heads
    • 3.5.2Intervention by focused elements
    • 3.5.3No intervention by quantificational elements
    • 3.5.4Interim summary
  • 3.6Proposal: Head movement to the specifier position
    • 3.6.1Details of the proposal
    • 3.6.2An illustration of the proposal
    • 3.6.3Deriving the properties of verb doubling constructions
      • 3.6.3.1The ordering of the functional projections in the CP periphery
      • 3.6.3.2The movement properties in verb doubling constructions
      • 3.6.3.3A syntactic explanation to Focus Intervention Effects
  • 3.7Alternative analyses to a head movement approach
    • 3.7.1Non-movement approaches
      • 3.7.1.1Base generation
      • 3.7.1.2Base generation plus operator movement
    • 3.7.2Phrasal movement approaches
      • 3.7.2.1Remnant VP movement
      • 3.7.2.2VP movement with subsequent deletion
  • 3.8Discussions and implications
    • 3.8.1Reformulating the Head Movement Constraint
    • 3.8.2A parallel analysis with phrasal movement
    • 3.8.3Focus Intervention Effects in phrasal movement
  • 3.9Conclusions
  • Notes