ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the child takes a circuitous path to long-distance movement in order to avoid potentially irreversible lexical decisions. A great deal of modern work in linguistic theory has been guided by the intuition that acquisition succeeds through an interaction of lexical knowledge and structural decisions. Lexical subcategorization occurs in a sister relation and reflects both arbitrary and systematic characteristics. The absence of subcategorization results in a failure of the proper government domain wherein lexical idiosyncracies can be expressed. The child representation could fail to be an acceptable adult representation because it has the lexical content of a subcategorized clause, and the syntactic representation of an adjunct clause. Before the child decides on an irreversible lexical subcategorization, a number of points of language variation are involved and therefore must be subject to very specific kinds of acquisition.
