Long Head Movement and Information Packaging in Breton

Abstract

This article explores long head movement configurations in Breton. Its purpose is twofold. First it contributes to existing work by demonstrating that Breton long head movement is motivated by information structure. The operation of general economy principles, made sensitive to information structure, determines many of the properties of the Breton construction. Secondly, it is argued that the derivation of the Breton construction does not involve movement per se; minimality conditions on movement are not central to the derivation. Instead, the remaining properties of the construction are attributed to a semantic property of tense-aspect markers which is represented at the LF interface. This work bears on the issue of how to model the interpretive dependency between auxiliaries and main verbs and raises questions concerning the interaction between the stylistic component, information structure, and the LF interface.