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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. 97–161

Chapter 4
Scope effects

Movement of quantificational heads

This chapter focuses on the semantic effects of head movement, which are often said to be absent from such movement. The primary goal of this chapter is to present a novel piece of evidence for head movement with semantic effects from Cantonese. An in-depth investigation into the distribution of quantificational heads such as aspectual verbs and modal verbs in Cantonese shows that these heads can occupy a non-canonical, high position in the sentence, if they are immediately followed by a quantificational element or a focused element. I propose that these quantificational heads can undergo overt head movement to a higher position and take scope in the landing site (i.e, scope-shifting head movement). Additionally, the proposed movement of quantificational heads is constrained by an independently motivated condition on interpretation, Scope Economy, which precludes semantically vacuous scope-shifting operations. The findings lend support to the claim that head movement can induce semantic effects. Importantly, head movement can shift scope relations, in a way similar to Quantifier Raising proposed for nominal quantifiers. Furthermore, Scope Economy is shown to be a general constraint on both phrasal movement and head movement. The conclusion of this chapter challenges the view that head movement does not result in any semantic effects – a view which has been said to claim that head movement is non-syntactic and occurs at PF. It is shown that head movement is no different from phrasal movement in the potential to induce semantic effects. This motivates a unified theory of movement of head movement and phrasal movement.
Article outline
  • 4.1Introduction
  • 4.2(Non-)occurrence of semantic effects with head movement: An ongoing debate
    • 4.2.1A lack of semantic effects?
    • 4.2.2Discourse effects of head movement
    • 4.2.3Scope effects of head movement
      • 4.2.3.1Movement of (quantificational) determiners
      • 4.2.3.2Movement of negation
        • (i)The licensing scope of negation
        • (ii)Scope relations with subject quantifiers
        • (iii)Scope relations with object quantifiers
      • 4.2.3.3Movement of modal verbs
      • 4.2.3.4Movement of aspectual verbs
    • 4.2.4Interim summary
  • 4.3The distribution of aspectual verbs and modal verbs
    • 4.3.1The (restricted) high position
    • 4.3.2Verbs that can appear in the high position
      • 4.3.2.1Aspectual verbs
      • 4.3.2.2Modal verbs
      • 4.3.2.3Interim summary
    • 4.3.3Quantificational elements
    • 4.3.4Focused elements
    • 4.3.5Interim summary
  • 4.4Proposal: Scope-shifting head movement
    • 4.4.1Two components of the proposal
      • 4.4.1.1Overt scope-shifting head movement
      • 4.4.1.2Scope Economy
    • 4.4.2Deriving the properties of movement of quantificational heads
      • 4.4.2.1Deriving the quantificational scope effects
      • 4.4.2.2Deriving the focus scope effects
      • 4.4.2.3Deriving the restriction on verbs
    • 4.4.3Remarks on the landing site and the trigger
      • 4.4.3.1The landing site
      • 4.4.3.2The trigger
  • 4.5Further evidence for the proposal
    • 4.5.1Stacking of quantificational heads in the high position
    • 4.5.2Shortest Move
    • 4.5.3Movement out of coordinate structures
    • 4.5.4A remark on the indeterminacy of island sensitivity
  • 4.6Alternative analyses to a head movement approach
    • 4.6.1Multiple base positions of aspectual verbs and modal verbs
    • 4.6.2An in-situ approach to aspectual verbs and modal verbs
    • 4.6.3A remnant movement approach
    • 4.6.4Movement of aspectual verbs and modal verbs as phrasal movement
  • 4.7Discussions and implications
    • 4.7.1Semantic effects of head movement
    • 4.7.2A parallel observation with phrasal elements
    • 4.7.3The trigger of head movement
  • 4.8Conclusions
  • Notes