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This chapter examines the notion of contrast in phonology and gives a formal account of two competing approaches to assigning contrastive feature specifications: contrast based on an ordering of features (Full Specification approach) and contrast based on logical redundancy (Contrastive Hierarchy approach). It shows how the Full Specification approach fails because it cannot differentiate the phonemes in a language while the Contrastive Hierarchy approach succeeds not only in differentiating the phonemes but also in clarifying some issues in underspecification theory. Under the Full Specification approach, the mutual redundancy of voice and nasality for an inventory /p, m/ leaves the segments with no non-redundant features, hence failing to differentiate the phonemes. Under the Contrastive Hierarchy approach, contrast can be successfully determined via hierarchical ordering of phonological features. The chapter explores the uses of contrast in the generative phonology literature and compares P. Kiparsky’s (1985) theory of structure preservation in phonology with J. Emonds’s (1976) theory of the same name in syntax.

According to Noam Chomsky, Move is the combination of Agree, Merge, and Pied-pipe. It decomposes into three more primitive operations, whereas Merge takes two syntactic objects—α and β—and forms a new object, and is therefore the basic combinatorial operation of narrow syntax. Agree holds between α and β having interpretable and uninterpretable inflectional features, respectively. This chapter examines three possible ways of eliminating head movement from narrow syntax: structure preservation, chain uniformity, and the A-over-A Condition. It shows that the A-over-A Condition, but not structure preservation and chain uniformity, offers a viable way of forcing pied-piping of the maximal projection of the goal.

The chapter starts from the observation that a diagnostic is simply an argument in which one has particular confidence, put to practical use. The logical space of possible arguments for phrasal movement is sketched and exemplified with examples of such arguments, some well‐known and others more recently proposed. Hartman’s (2012) discussion of intervention effects is cited as an instance in which an established property of movement (intervention effects in A‐movement constructions) diagnosed the distribution of movement in a more poorly understood construction (English tough movement). The question of whether phrasal movement exists in the first place is taken up, in the context of the history of its discovery and current syntactic approaches that dispense with it.

This book explores the consequences of Noam Chomsky’s theory that head movement is not part of narrow syntax and argues that the current notion of syntax can and must accommodate a species of head movement. More specifically, it suggests that head movement is part of the narrow syntax, and that it applies where the goal of an Agree relation is defective. The book also implies a notion of structural deficiency as the key to understanding the conditions under which internal merge may apply to terminals, and proposes that head movement applies where the goal of an Agree relation is defective. Moreover, it shows that head movement does not differ considerably in its LF-effects from DP-movement (A-movement), considers three possible ways of eliminating head movement from narrow syntax (structure preservation, chain uniformity, and the A-over-A Condition), and describes the movement of simultaneously minimal and maximal categories, focusing on Romance clitics.

This chapter considers how the compositional theory argued for in the preceding chapters might apply to a variety of additional cases where a lexical, degree-theoretic semantics has been proposed. For example, the analysis of attitude verbs like “to want”, nouns like “idiot”, and verbs like “to cool”. The chapter suggests that, rather than diagnosing scalar structure, the kinds of data motivating lexical degree-theoretic interpretation here should be understood as diagnostic of order-theoretic properties on the relevant expression’s domain of predication. Supporting the idea of a general recipe for how such cases should be addressed, the chapter raises theoretical questions like the following: do any lexical categories natively have a degree semantics? When is a degree-theoretic treatment appropriate? Should there be morphosyntactic requirements (e.g., overt or covert “much”) for an interpretation based on degrees, or not? What alternative analyses of extant cases are available?