Against Excessively Local Movement: With Special Reference to RTO

Chomsky (2015) assumes that the root R is universally too weak to label, and hence just as English T can label TP after strengthening by SPEC-T, so R can label RP after Spec-R is occupied by object. This assumption is made for ECM constructions which has been regarded as including raising-to-object (RTO) since Lasnik and Saito (1991; cf. Rosenbaum 1967). RTO-like movement should be applied to the simple object of a transitive verb if R is universally weak. In this case, the movement of the object to Spec-R is from the Compl-R. In other words, the weakness of R should be remedied by the domain-internal movement of its object. In this paper, we will examine the problems with this analysis after reviewing a few versions of anti-locality, and present solutions to the problems.