ABSTRACT
Most analyses of successive cyclic movement under the Minimalist Program have centered around the notion of a wh-feature in the embedded Comp. We suggest that this feature is spurious, given that it has no semantic import and its only purpose is to trigger the very movement it tries to explain. We make use of Richards’s tucking-in, and extend it from Move to Merge. This analysis, inspired by the Tree-Adjoining Grammar approach, allows us to trigger the effect of successive cyclic movement by postulating one single application of Move, and then merging elements from higher clauses below the position of the moved wh. Issues of clausal typing, typology of cyclic movement and wh-islands are also explored, in connection with ideas about phrase structure that apply independently to other constructions.
