String Vacuous Overt Verb Raising

要旨

Although evidence is abundant for overt syntactic verb raising in head initial languages, no convincing evidence has been found for comparable verb movement in head final languages such as Japanese. This state of affairs has led some researchers to conclude that there is no Head Parameter as such in UG. In this paper, we present arguments for overt verb raising in Japanese, thereby defending the validity of the Head Parameter with its two values [head initial] and [head final].