SYNTACTIC DEPENDENCIES AND PHASE EXTENSION: VERB MOVEMENT IN STANDARD ARABIC

Abstract

This paper examines verb movement in Standard Arabic and provides a new analysis to account for this obligatory movement in terms of C/T-v syntactic dependencies. I recast the proposal put forth by Biberauer and Roberts (2010) where they claim that verb movement is an instance of a reprojective movement (See also Koenemean 2000; Suranyi 2005; Donati 2006; among others). However, I provide a different motivation for this movement in terms of locality and last resort. This approach is coupled with Gallego's (2010) analysis of phase extension where he argues that verb movement is triggered by the need to minimize the search domain of the C probe. I adopt the same mechanism, but differ with Gallego in the type of feature the head C needs to check. I argue that the feature in question is finiteness [Fin], an interpretable unvalued feature on C, which has a valued instance on v. Therefore, v moves to the left of T, as a last resort, in order to circumvent the intervention effect caused by the head T and to be in the local domain of C; thus, preserving the locality of the probe and extending the vP phase boundary.