Head movement

Overview

So far, we have examined a range of syntactic structures which are derived by a series of merger operations. We now go on to look at structures whose derivation involves not only merger but also a movement operation called head movement. Here we will focus mainly on two specific types of head movement operation, one which affects auxiliaries in present-day English, and another which affected main verbs in earlier stages of English; we also look briefly at how head movement can apply to nouns.