The article deduces a modified version of the traditional ban on movement out of moved elements that provides a new perspective on it. Under the proposed analysis, the problem with the movement of YP out of moved XP does not arise at the point where YP moves out of XP, as in previous accounts. Instead, it arises already with the movement of XP: XP itself cannot undergo movement in this case. Any later movement out of XP is then trivially blocked. The proposed analysis leaves room for movement out of moved elements to take place in well-defined contexts. Several constructions bear this out, including German/Dutch r -pronoun constructions, Slavic left-branch extraction, and quantifier float more generally. What the proposed analysis deduces is then not the traditional ban on movement out of moved elements, but a ban on movement of phases with nonagreeing specifiers, which the article argues should replace the former ban. As a result, the analysis also extends to the immobility of verb-second clauses in German. The article also provides a new perspective on the Adjunct Condition (the ban on movement out of adjuncts). It shows that movement out of adjuncts is possible in the same configuration as movement out of moved elements. The proposed account of the latter is then extended to the Adjunct Condition. The article also proposes a labeling-based account of the Coordinate Structure Constraint, which also captures the across-the-board-movement exception.

The article argues that in constructions where there is more than one phrase at a phasal edge, only the highest edge is available for movement and anaphor binding. This shows that only the outermost edge counts as the edge of a phase for the Phase Impenetrability Condition ( PIC). The article also demonstrates that moving the element that counts as the phasal edge in multiple specifier/adjunct cases can affect the PIC status of the remaining edges. These conclusions provide a new argument for the contextuality of phasehood. A number of recent works have argued that the phasal status of a phrase can be affected by the syntactic context in which it occurs. This article goes one step further: it shows that the concept of phasal edge , more precisely the status of a specifier/adjunct regarding the PIC, can also be affected by the syntactic context in which the specifier/adjunct occurs. The article also discusses several issues regarding the syntax and semantics of adjectives, possessors, and demonstratives, including what Partee (2006) calls familiar demonstratives, as well as anaphor binding.

On the basis of a number of cases where the status of X with respect to phasehood changes depending on the syntactic context in which X occurs, I argue for a contextual approach to phasehood whereby the highest phrase in the extended projection of all lexical categories—N, P, A, and V (passive and active)—functions as a phase. The relevant arguments concern extraction and ellipsis. I argue that ellipsis is phase-constrained: only phases and complements of phase heads can in principle undergo ellipsis. I show that Ā-extraction out of an ellipsis site is possible only if the ellipsis site corresponds to a phasal complement. I also provide evidence for the existence of several AspectPs, all of which have morphological manifestations, in the VP domain of English and show that they crucially affect the phasehood of this domain. The article provides a uniform account of a number of superficially different constructions involving extraction and ellipsis from Serbo-Croatian, Japanese, Turkish, and English.

The article demonstrates that the rescue-by-PF-deletion account of the amelioration effect of island violations under ellipsis, originally noted by Ross (1969), can be extended to account for the that -trace effect, including the adverb amelioration effect, and the lack of intervention effects with certain null arguments that are otherwise found with their overt counterparts, as well as to deduce the generalizations that traces do not count as interveners for relativized minimality effects and that traces void islandhood. The fact that the rescue-by-PF-deletion analysis makes it possible to unify a number of previously unrelated phenomena should be taken as a strong argument in its favor. The current extension of the rescue-by-PF-deletion approach, on which the rescue can arise not only through the deletion process involved in ellipsis but also through regular copy deletion, also accounts for the different behavior of the Superiority Condition and the Wh -Island Condition with respect to the amelioration effect under ellipsis, a surprising difference given that both of these are generally subsumed under relativized minimality effects in current research.

The article proposes a new theory of successive-cyclic movement that reconciles the early and the current minimalist approaches to it. As in the early approach, there is no feature checking in intermediate positions of successive-cyclic movement. However, as in the current approach and unlike in early minimalism, successive-cyclic movement starts before the final target of movement enters the structure, and Form Chain is eliminated. The locality of Move and the locality of Agree are shown to be radically different, Agree being free from several mechanisms that constrain Move, namely, phases and the Activation Condition. However, there is no need to take phases to define locality domains of syntax or to posit the Activation Condition as an independent principle. They still hold empirically for Move as theorems. The Generalized EPP (the “I need a Spec” property of attracting heads) and the Inverse Case Filter are also dispensable. The traditional Case Filter, stated as a checking requirement, is the sole driving force of A-movement. More generally, Move is always driven by a formal inadequacy (an uninterpretable feature) of the moving element, while Agree is target driven. The system resolves a lookahead problem that arises under the EPP-driven movement approach, where the EPP diacritic indicating that X moves is placed on Y, not X, although X often needs to start moving before Y enters the structure.

In this reply, I show that Russian examples that Bailyn (2001) uses to argue against Bošković and Takahashi's (1998) analysis of scrambling are irrelevant to the analysis because they in fact do not involve scrambling. I also establish a crosslinguistic correlation between lack of articles and availability of scrambling and provide an account of the correlation under Bošković and Takahashi's approach to scrambling.

The article provides a comprehensive account of the distribution of the null complementizer in English that does not appeal to the notion of government, thus contributing to the minimalist goal of eliminating arbitrary relations such as government. The account is based on Pesetsky's (1992) proposal that the null complementizer is a PF affix, which we instantiate through the affix-hopping approach to affixation. We also provide an account of several subject/object asymmetries with respect to extraction out of various clausal arguments.

I show that multiple wh -fronting languages (MWFL) do not behave uniformly regarding wh -movement and eliminate MWFL from the crosslinguistic typology concerning wh -movement in multiple questions. Regarding when they have wh -movement, MWFL behave like non-MWFL: some behave like English (they always have wh -movement), some like Chinese (they never have it), and some like French (they have it optionally although, as in French, wh -movement is sometimes required). MWFL differ from English, Chinese, and French in that in MWFL even wh -phrases that do not undergo wh -movement still must front for an independent reason, argued to involve focus. The fronting has several exceptions (semantic, phonological, and syntactic in nature), explanation for which leads me to posit a new type of in-situ wh -phrase and argue for the possibility of pronunciation of lower copies of chains.

Under the standard analysis (e.g., Fukui 1993, Saito 1985, 1992), scrambling in Japanese raises a serious problem for the last resort view of Move α, since it is considered to involve optional overt movement that has no driving force. In this article we propose a new analysis of scrambling that puts scrambling in conformity with the Last Resort principle. We argue that scrambled elements are base-generated in their surface non-θ-positions and undergo obligatory LF movement to the position where they receive θ-roles, which we consider to be formal features capable of driving movement. We show that our LF analysis of scrambling is both conceptually and empirically superior to the standard optional overt movement analysis.