A local approach to the Williams Cycle

• Three problems are defined for derivational approaches to improper movement: generality, locality, and promiscuity.
• A version of the Williams Cycle is proposed that does without backtracking and look-ahead.
• Edge features are viewed as defective copies of phase heads.
• Edge features successively value movement-related features on moved items, thereby recording derivational history.
• The Williams Cycle requires satisfaction of f-seq in criterial positions.

Asymmetries between movement types have standardly been derived by theories of improper movement that preclude certain configurations where different kinds of movement steps are mixed in the course of displacement of a single item. However, closer inspection reveals that none of the existing accounts of improper movement can be maintained under a strictly derivational, local approach to displacement in which syntactic structure is generated bottom-up, by successive application of structure-building operations (such as internal or external Merge), and only very small parts of the structure are accessible at any given point in the derivation (cf. Chomsky, 2001). In view of this state of affairs, the present paper pursues a fairly modest goal: it implements a specific constraint against improper movement going back to Williams (1974, 2003) – viz, what I will refer to the Williams Cycle – in a local way, without a need for backtracking or look-ahead.