The ban on headless XP-movement is not narrow syntactic

Abstract

This paper argues that the ban on headless XP-movement should not be captured in narrow syntactic terms. That is, there is no constraint in the syntactic computation preventing remnant movement of a phrase from which the head has been extracted, i.e., so-called Takano’s Generalization is wrong. This is demonstrated through a case study of the emphatic doubling construction in Rioplatense Spanish, which requires a derivation proceeding exactly along these lines. It is further argued that the relevant prohibition should be stated as a condition that applies at PF: A preliminary conjecture on the nature of this prohibition is also offered.