The Unity of Movement: Evidence from verb movement in Cantonese

Displacement (of linguistic expressions) is aubiquitous phenomenon innatural language. In the generative tradition, displacement is modeled interms of transformation, or more precisely, movement, which establishes dependencies among syntactic constituents inaphrase structure. This volume probes the question regarding to what extent movement theories canbe unified. Specifically, Iaddress issues surrounding the debate of the distinction between head movement and phrasal movement over the past few decades. The distinction presupposes that structural complexity of the moving element is correlated with its movement properties. The goal of this volume is to show that this is anunwarranted assumption. Based on anumber of case studies on verb displacement phenomena inCantonese, Iattempt aunified theory of movement by abandoning the head/phrase distinction inmovement theories. Particularly, Ishow (i) that verbs inCantonese can undergo syntactic movement to the peripheral position of asentence and is subject to general locality/minimality constraints onmovement, and (ii) that their movement may affect semantic interpretation, leading to discourse effects and scope effects that are commonly observed inphrasal movement. Ifurther argue, with evidence from linearization, that head movement and phrasal movement in Cantonese are subject to the same mechanism when determining the pronunciation of the movement chains. These observations converge on the conclusion that the phrase structure status of syntactic constituents bears aminimalrole intheorizing displacement phenomena innatural language. This volume represents a minimalist pursuit of a unified theory of movement. © 2024 - John Benjamins B.V.