Summary: | Syntactic movement of phrases, modeled in terms of Internal Merge, has traditionally been distinguished on empirical grounds from syntactic movement of heads, modeled by other means. I demonstrate that, once the class of head movements implicated in word formation is excluded from consideration (assumed to be, for example, post-syntactic, following Harizanov & Gribanova 2019), the residue of head movements, which are purely syntactic in nature, and phrasal movement can receive a unified treatment. Both phrasal and syntactic head movement are implemented here as instances of Internal Merge (following, for example, Fukui & Takano 1998; Toyoshima 2001; Matushansky 2006; Vicente 2007; 2009). This treatment of syntactic head movement renders long-standing stipulations about structure building such as the Chain Uniformity Condition superfluous. It also makes sense of the properties of syntactic head movement, as demonstrated in a case study of participle fronting in Bulgarian, which targets a specifier position, violates the Head Movement Constraint, can cross finite clause boundaries, and can have discourse effects.
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