Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

This talk, based on joint work with Carlo Cecchetto, investigates the status of unmotivated movement in syntax, so called ‘unprobed movement’.  By elaborating on the theory of labeling developed by Cecchetto & Donati (2015), in which the label is provided by the probe of the merging operation, I assume that unprobed movement is possible in principle but is severely restricted in practice, as it leads to the creation of an object without a label. Given this framework, I re-consider three movement configurations: the intermediate step of successive movement, which has no obvious trigger and is intrinsically unstable; QR, which has no morphological reflex, is systematically covert and appears to be clause-bounded; and head movement, which again has peculiar locality restrictions and correlates with extended projections and the creation of complex lexical items. By putting successive cyclicity, QR and head movement into a new natural class, that of unprobed movements, I provide a new explanation to old problems and make a strong case in favor of a label-driven syntax in response to recent attempts (cf. Chomsky 2013; 2015; 2019) to expunge labels from syntax and relegate them to the interface.