Workshop on Inversion and Verb Movement

The morphosyntax of verb movement revisited

Jan-Wouter Zwart
University of Groningen

This paper addresses the (perennial) question of how verb movement is related to inflectional morphology. It focuses on the systems of Chomsky (1993) and Zwart (1993, 1997) and argues that recent developments in syntactic theory allow us to dispense with much of the machinery employed there. The crucial developments in this respect are a) the Derivational Approach to Syntactic Relations (Epstein et al. 1998), and b) the concept of inflectional morphology as the morphological realization of a syntactic dependency relation (Zwart 2005). Equally important, but already incorporated in Zwart (1997), is the idea that morphology is part of a postsyntactic spell-out component (e.g. Halle and Marantz 1993).

Early minimalist approaches to verb movement adopted a checking analysis, where a verb enters the syntactic component fully inflected and carrying features for tense and agreement. Counterparts to those features were assumed to reside in the functional heads of the INFL-complex (carried over from the theory of Principles and Parameters). Verb movement was then analysed as being triggered by a matching requirement among the features of the functional heads and the verb. In more recent work (such as Chomsky 2001), the architecture remains largely intact (albeit with less functional heads), but the relation between the functional and lexical elements is now defined in terms of (local) c-command (the ‘probe-goal system’), and no longer requires (or explains) movement.

The probe-goal system retains the idea that features associated with functional categories reside in both lexical and functional heads. Elements acquire in the course of a derivation not a feature, but a feature value. Agreement, for instance, results when the unvalued phi-features of T are valued by the corresponding features of a noun phrase subject c-commanded by T.

I would like to propose a simplification of this system, in which uninterpretable/unvalued features do not exist, and agreement is a matter of feature sharing between sisters. A constituent may acquire a feature when it is merged with an element carrying that feature; in that case, inflection is the morphological realization of the acquired feature on a term of the relevant constituent. For example, when a subject is merged with its sister (here called the predicate), it shares its person/number features with the predicate, which in turn realizes these features on one of its terms, the finite verb (Zwart 2005).

It will be argued that thinking along these lines allows us to do away with all functional heads involved in verbal inflection and verb movement in work since Chomsky (1981). This is because in this system, like in Chomsky (2001), verb movement is no longer tied in with feature valuation or the realization of inflectional morphology. This is arguably a desirable result, as the connection between morphology and verb movement was always an unhappy one (giving rise to an unwanted overt/covert movement dichotomy, and yielding problems in languages with asymmetric verb movement patterns apparently unrelated to morphology, such as Dutch). We discuss the consequences for the Mirror Principle, for the functional element tense, and for the concept of ‘functional head’ more generally.

All this should lead to renewed interest in the question of why verbs move.

References:
Chomsky 1981, Lectures on Government and Binding.
Chomsky 1993, A minimalist program for linguistic theory.
Chomsky 2001, Derivation by phase.
Epstein et al 1998, A derivational approach to syntactic relations.
Halle and Marantz 1993, Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection.
Zwart 1993, Dutch syntax: a minimalist approach.
Zwart 1997, Morphosyntax of verb movement: a minimalist approach to the syntax of Dutch.
Zwart 2005, Local agreement.