String Vacuous Head Movement: The Case of V-te in Japanese

Abstract

This study argues that verbal heads of a certain kind do undergo overt movement in a string vacuous fashion in Japanese. Evidence comes from properties of te-clauses. To account for significant syntactic differences between complement and adjunct te-clauses, we propose that the head of the complement te-clause, unlike the head of the adjunct one, moves to the matrix clause in a way that cannot easily be detected based on word order. Moreover, we explore predictions of the analysis for ellipsis phenomena, showing that the head of the complement te-clause escapes ellipsis by being extracted out of the ellipsis site. We also observe that the movement process under examination is an instance of head movement that does not feed morphological complex word formation.