Long-Distance Wh-Movement and Minimalism

1 Introduction Long wh-movement is a phenomenon by which an element appears to move directly from an A-or A-position to a higher A-destination, ignoring weak island constraints and bypassing the intermediate landing sites that are characteristic of successive-cyclic wh-movement. Cinque (1990) gives some examples of the contrast between long and successive-cyclic wh-movements, illustrating the long-distance variety's immunity to weak island effects (the (a) examples show successful long movement, and the (b) examples show failure of long movement because the moved element requires successive-cyclic movement): (1) Extraposition Island (= Cinque (1990:2), ex. (7)) a. To whom is it time to speak t? b. *How is it time to behave t? (2) Factive Island (= Cinque (1990:2), ex. (6)) a. To whom do you regret that you could not speak t? b. *How do you regret that you behaved t? These data indicate that some sort of island-defying movement is available in certain instances and/or to certain elements. This paper focuses on the properties of long-movement itself, leaving the issue of which elements may participate in this phenomenon for future research. For present purposes, it is sufficient to note that Cinque (1990) and Chung (1994, 1998) notice that only certain DPs are eligible to participate in a long-movement operation. Cinque argues that the moved element in a long-movement construction must be " referen-tial. " In Cinque's terminology, this is a DP " that refer[s] to specific members of a preestab-lished set " (Cinque 1990:8). It is D-linked (Pesetsky 1987), and, unlike non-referential DPs, it can enter into coreference relationships. Chung points out some deficiencies with this proposal , but it is a sufficient working analysis for now. I return to this issue in the conclusion. 1 Further, Cinque's formal notions of antecedent government and binding have quite different incarnations in the Minimalist Program (Chomksy 1999). For example, antecedent government, whose role is to enforce strict locality in successive-cyclic movement, is superseded by the Phase Impenetrability Condition. Antecedent government is consequently discarded in Minimalism. With the theoretical advances of Minimalist syntax, Cinque's ideas merit new scrutiny and revision. I discuss this topic in more detail in Section 7 and, with respect to Minimalism and long movement generally, immediately below. As I show in Section 2, there is strong evidence that long wh-movement does indeed bypass the typical stopping-off points that characterize ordinary wh-movement. A DP that undergoes long wh-movement appears to move directly …