A Diachronic Consideration on English V-to-I Movement

This article is to show my considerations to V-to-I movement with the minimalist notions in the history of English. Based on Minimalist Program(1998, 1999), contrary to V-movement approaches in Pollock(1989), Chomsky(1989) etc., it is considered to have been no overt V-to-I movement in the history of English. Defending certain proposals of Lasnik(1994) there are two forms of verbal morphology listed in lexicon: inflected form and bare form. Inflected verbs appear on I due to I’s affixal properties and bare form to V. In Middle English the phonological features of main verbs taken to be inflected appear on I and in New English main verbs taken to be bare to V but auxiliaries ‘have/be/do’ are taken to be inflected according to their morphology so the phonological features of them appear on I without overt V-to-I movement. Language changes in the history of English have been caused by the change of PF legibility conditions which was changed from inflected form of main verbal morphology to bare form.