Head movement does not stand in high reputation in these days

*Münchhausen-style head movement and the analysis of verb secondGisbert FanselowUniversity of Potsdam1 IntroductionHead movement has gained a bad reputation. It is accused of being incompatible withfundamental laws of movement theory. The minimum penalty is banishment to phonology(Chomsky 1999), but more radical prosecutors (Mahajan 2001) have pleaded for capitalpunishment. The head movement constructions of previous models are analyzed asinvolving remnant movement (see Koopman & Szabolcsi 2000, Mahajan 2001, Müller2003). The present paper subscribes to such a reductionist view as well, but it argues that thesubstitution type of head movement exemplified, e.g., by verb second movement cannot bereplaced by remnant movement. For these constructions, we develop a restrictive conceptof head movement that arises from a slight extension of assumptions made in Chomsky(1995). Our approach differs from others in confining head movement to true substitutionswithin the limits of extended projections in the sense of Grimshaw (1991).The paper is organized in two parts. The first part is dedicated to a theoretical analysis ofthe pros and cons of head movement. A slight relaxation of the conditions of featurechecking opens up a tiny and highly specialized niche for head movement. This version of*Some of the id eas in this paper have been presented at the University of California at Los Angeles, theAristotle University at Thessaloniki, and the University of Wuppertal ...