On the minimality of Generalized Pied-Piping

Abstract

Under the view of syntactic movement as driven by the need to attract and check formal features (Chomsky, 1995), what appears to be “movement” reduces to Generalized Pied-Piping (GPP), an operation that carries along the features of the category that contains the attracted feature. This study addresses the question of whether GPP is constrained by minimality just as the core feature-checking operation Attract is constrained by the Minimal Link Condition. Phenomena where A-movement and A′-movement interact are shown to suggest that GPP is immune to such a constraint. Thus, the asymmetry with respect to feature-minimality in movement relations in general (i.e., a certain feature cannot cross over another feature of the same type while others can) is captured by the operational asymmetry between Attract and GPP, which is naturally understood if we think of C HL as a derivational system.