English Verb Movement

English Verb Movement

I argue that Chomsky's (1993) Minimalist approach faces a problem in accounting for English verb movement, even though it can account for French verb movement. English verb movement might be dealt with in terms of the principle of Laziness (Chomsky 1991). However, it is not a principled but a stipulative account, which may as well be replaced with more principled explanation, since tre Laziness Principle is not used in accounting for other syntactic phenomena except for English verb movement. English and French verb movement is not clearly dealt with even within Chomsky's (1999, 2000, 2001) recent framework of tre Minimalist approach even though he suggests that verb movement might be a PF phenomenon. I argue that English verb movement can be explained in a principled way in terms of the LF cycle, which is independently motivated, within Chomsky's (1993) framework. Also I suggest that English and French verb movement can be explained well in terms of PF affixation with the assumption of a distinction in the strength of V-features between English and French Ts, assuming the clausal structure suggested in Chomsky (1995).