Abstract
In Chomsky's Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory (MPLT), movement is constrained by a locality theory on chain-links.1 Briefly stated, it is assumed that a constituent y may cross any position (3 and move to a position a, as long as a and â are equidistant from 7. As Chomsky demonstrates, this locality theory has several highly desirable consequences. However, Chomsky restricts his discussion to examples in the present tense, and at first sight it seems that his proposal does not carry over to the complex tenses. From this, several students have concluded that Chomsky's locality theory should be abandoned (Zwart 1993). In this article, however, we will adopt Chomsky's proposal and investigate the consequences for the description of the perfect tense. Further, we will briefly address the question whether the auxiliaries should be considered as semantically vacuous or not.
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