The Even Yearbook 6 (2004)
#61
volume: 6 (2004)
pages: 167–183
author: Balázs Surányi
title: Head movement qua Root Merger
abstract: It has been a recurrent theme in the recent minimalist literature that head movement (HM) as construed under the checking theory of movement sticks out in a typology of movements as exceptional, and hence its status in the computational system itself is questionable. I begin this paper by showing that HM in fact bleeds from even more wounds than is commonly acknowledged. Recent reactions include attempts to reanalyse HM as PF-displacement (Chomsky 2000), or as XP-movement (e.g., Mahajan 2000, 2001, Koopman and Szabolcsi 2001).
I propose here that HM does exist at the level of narrow syntax, however, instead of involving adjunction, it involves root merger, in terms of generalized transformations. I argue that (i) HM is enforced by the cyclic spellout property of syntactic computation, and (ii) in the course of HM, the complex (inflected) head reprojects its label (cf. Hornstein and Uriagereka 2002). I demonstrate how this account effectively eliminates complications around HM, bringing it on a par with phrasal movements.
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