Shape Conservation and Remnant Movement

Abstract

Standard (``primary'') remnant movement constructions as introduced by Thiersch (1985) and den Besten & Webelhuth (1987; 1990) differ significantly from other (``secondary'') remnant movement constructions as they have recently been proposed by Kayne (1998), Johnson (1998), and others. This paper shows that a unified optimality-theoretic approach is possible if we assume that whereas primary remnant movement is feature-driven, secondary remnant movement is a repair phenomenon -- movement proceeds in violation of Last Resort in order to respect a higher-ranked Shape Conservation constraint (Williams (1999)). On the conceptual side, a new model of optimization in syntax is proposed: Optimization proceeds locally, not globally, and it affects extremely small parts of syntactic derivations. This move is shown to be both conceptually attractive and empirically motivated.

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