Phrasal Movement and Its Discontents: Diseases and Diagnoses [Book Chapter]

Abstract

The chapter starts from the observation that a diagnostic is simply an argument in which one has particular confidence, put to practical use. The logical space of possible arguments for phrasal movement is sketched and exemplified with examples of such arguments, some well‐known and others more recently proposed. Hartman’s (2012) discussion of intervention effects is cited as an instance in which an established property of movement (intervention effects in A‐movement constructions) diagnosed the distribution of movement in a more poorly understood construction (English tough movement). The question of whether phrasal movement exists in the first place is taken up, in the context of the history of its discovery and current syntactic approaches that dispense with it.