Phrasal movement vs. head movement:
On licensing conditions on NPIs

This presentation explicates mechanisms behind locality effects in NPI-licensing: Japanese NPIs obey the clausemate condition, while English NPIs do not. To elucidate this variation, Lee (1993) suggests that covert NPI movement to [Spec,NegP] through the intermediate [Spec,CP] causes improper movement under the assumption that [Spec,NegP] is an A-position in Japanese. However, our data show that the NPI-morpheme -sika can be also attached to X⁰ (e.g. verbs), which indicates that NPI-licensing does not always involve phrasal movement to a Spec-position. We propose that Japanese NPI is licensed by covert head movement of -sika to Neg, and the intervening C⁰ -to blocks it from moving across a clause. We thus argue that some instances of head-movement happen at LF (contra Chomsky, 2001).