Long Head Movement? Verb movement and cliticization in Croatian

Abstract

Croatian, along with other Slavic, and some Romance languages, has type of verb-fronting — the ‘Long Head Movement’ (LHM) construction — in which a non-finite verb raises to C 0 across a finite auxiliary, in apparent contravention of the Head Movement Constraint. Rivero and Roberts have each argued on the basis of LHM-data that the Minimality condition of the ECP should permit one head to cross another under certain conditions. A detailed investigation of the properties of LHM in Croatian shows that the conclusions drawn by these authors with respect to the ECP are inadequate in two respects. Firstly, the structural analysis for LHM sentences in Croatian assumed by Rivero and by Roberts is incorrect. Clitics in Croatian are syntactically enclitic, right-adjoining to C 0. The auxialiary involved in LHM-constructions is a clitic form, hence is located in C 0 at S-structure, and not lower down in the clause. Since the verb and clitic auxiliary in LHM occupy the same position, the Croatian data fail to support the view that the ECP must allow for one head to move across another. Secondly, although the notion of ‘last resort’ is alluded to by these authors in connection with the ‘triggering’ of LHM in grammatical instances, the role of ‘economy’ in ruling out starred examples is not properly considered, rendering argumentation with respect to ECP based on such (ungrammatical) examples invalid. However, LHM does involve ‘long movement’ in the sense of ‘acyclic incorporation’. We conclude that the correct definition of Minimality is one based on Baker's notion of ‘distinctness’ of heads.