The aims of this paper are to examine an analysis of English Verb Movement within the framework of the Government and Binding theory (GB theory) and the Minimalist program and to find out how this study could help English learners in Korea to understa...
The aims of this paper are to examine an analysis of English Verb Movement within the framework of the Government and Binding theory (GB theory) and the Minimalist program and to find out how this study could help English learners in Korea to understand and speak English. It is believed that an analysis on Verb Movement in English is an important part of Head Movement from early Generative Grammar to the Minimalist Program.
First of all, this paper reviews the analysis of Verb Movement within GB theory based on Pollock's study (1989) and Chomsky's (1989).
According to Pollock's study, Verb Movement in GB theory is regarded as two different functional category, Agr and Tense included in verbal morphology and he insists on Verb-raising which main verb should move to functional category Agr and Tense. The reason why Agr of English is opaque, in that it does not permit a category it contains to assign θ-role. He presents Affix Hopping in English to combine head of functional category with verbal root.
Chomsky accepts most of Pollock's proposal and introduces LF-raising after Affix Hopping to solve the Pollock's problems. He presents Principle of Least Effort in order to explain relationship between Verb -raising and LF-raising. However, his analysis also has problems about the deletion of traces in LF.
Verb Movement in the Minimalist Program, unlike GB theory, suggests that the scope of Verb Movement is determined by the morphological properties of the inflectional elements and the role of syntactic operation must check them at a proper position when inflectional elements are chosen from the lexicon. So Head Movement of verb in the Minimalist Program is to check all morphological properties by the appropriate inflectional category to meet an interface condition.
The study concludes that the Minimalist Program has solved many of problems unsolved within GB theory and explained to use minimal theory. However, this still is not perfect to be describe phenomenon of universal language. Therefore, we needs to study to describe grammar more effectively.