A-movement: Its successive cyclicity revisited

This paper reconsiders the successive cyclicity of A-movement, which has been controversial in the literature. I argue that contrary to what has been argued, A-movement can be both successive cyclic and non-successive cyclic, showing that this proposal follows as one consequence of simplest Merge, which applies freely. I claim that whether A-movement proceeds successive cyclically or not depends on how Merge applies to C and T (as well as to v and R) in the derivation. I show that the discussion in the paper is cross-linguistically endorsed. It is also shown that the proposal has favorable implications for clausal construction, the labelability of T and wager-class sentences. The present paper is one illustration of Merge playing a key role in syntactic derivation, supporting the hypothesis that the operation is the core of the Faculty of Language.