Chapter 6 - Inflectional Phrases(36) IP
DP I'
- I vP
-ed AP vP
quickly DP v'
he v VP
e DP V'
his fingers V
count
‘he quickly counted his fingers’
This analysis suggests that elements can move around in a structure quite freely
and in particular both upward and downward movements are possible. But all the
movements we have seen so far have been in an upward direction, including all the
verb movements and the movement of the subject out of its original VP-internal
position. It is possible that this might just be a bias of the small number of movement
processes we happen to have reviewed so far. But it turns out, once one starts to
investigate movements on a greater scale that the vast majority of them have an
upward orientation, which might lead us to the conclusion that perhaps it is our
analysis of the small number of apparent cases of downward movements that is at
fault. One reason to believe that downward movements are not possible is that it is
ungrammatical for certain things to move downwards, which is difficult to explain if
such movements are allowable. For example, the verb always moves to the light verb
positions and light verbs never move to the verb:
(37) a [vP he –v [VP the ball hit]] he hit 1 the ball t 1
b [vP he –v [VP the ball hit]] *he t 1 the ball hit 1
If downward movements are a possible grammatical process, we have no explanation
for why (37b) is ungrammatical in English and can only resort to stipulation that
English verbs move upwards in this case. For such reasons, during the 1990s the idea
of downward movement was abandoned and all seemingly downward movements
were reanalysed as involving upward movements instead.
A further problem with the analysis in (36) is the explanation of why the verb
cannot move to the I position. We have seen that verbs are perfectly capable of
moving, so why this is not possible to the inflection position is quite mysterious.
Some, who accepted the ‘I-lowering’ (affix lowering) analysis, have suggested that the