Movement in Minimalism

One of the most important findings in syntactic theory is that syntactic structures can be built through a displacement operation, or movement. A key proposal of the Minimalist Program is that displacement and plain structure-building are established by one operation, Merge (Chomsky 1995). This proposal simplifies the theory of structure-building significantly. A challenge to this view, however, is that there are many well-known differences between movement types. In this advanced course, we examine three major problems in a minimalist view of movement: (i) the distinction between A- and A'-movement, (ii) the problem of intermediate successive-cyclic movement, and (iii) differences between phrasal movement and head movement.