Investigating N-Movement in English: Presence and Proposals

Adam Leif and Masaya Yoshida

It has been suggested that the Noun (N) heads of NPs in English can move and that N may land in the “little n” (n) head of an nP, a proposed functional phrase between Determiner Phrase (DP) and NP. However, other N-movement proposals suggest that N may instead move elsewhere. Additionally, there is little experimental evidence of N-movement in English, where, unlike in Romance languages, such movement would occur covertly — and, therefore, be difficult to observe. If N-movement does occur in English, it should be sensitive to movement constraints, like the Head Movement Constraint and Coordinate Structure Constraint. To investigate whether this is the case, we introduce the pseudo-Prepositional Phrase (PP) coordination construction (e.g. “I want to distinguish the fear₁ of John₂ t₁ of Mary and of David₃ t₁ of Sarah”), a potential N-movement structure where the N heads of coordinated NPs move across-the-board (ATB) to the same hierarchically higher position. We utilize this construction in a formal acceptability rating experiment, manipulating CONNECTIVE (and vs. from) and GAP (present vs. absent) and anticipating similarly high ratings in both gap-absent cases (since neither involves movement that potentially violates movement constraints). If ATB-N-movement occurs in English, and-gap should be rated lower than the gap-absent cases but higher than from-gap: the former observes HMC and CSC while the latter violates them. We found a significant effect of GAP (t = 8.2456) and GAP x CONNECTIVE (t = -3.8954), demonstrating that the pseudo-PP coordination construction involves ATB-N-movement. Through further analysis, we show that the moved N lands in n: but, interestingly, this does not appropriately describe how other noun types, like non-verb-derived light (e.g. someone) and heavy nouns (e.g. candidate), move. As such, we suggest that non-verb-derived nouns are treated differently than verb-derived ones, potentially according to other previous N-movement proposals.