Prepositional complementizers as attractors

The prepositional complementizers 'de'/'di'/'to' in French, Italian and English enter the derivation above the VP, and not äs sister to the IP they are associated with. The relation between complementizer and IP is expressed by having the IP movefrom within VP to the specifier position ofthe complementizer. That movement can be thought of in terms of Chomsky's (1995: chap. 4) notion of attraction. Subsequent raising ofthe complementizer (to a head W), followed by phrasal movement to Spec.W, produces the observed word order in these languages. This kind of derivation (which should be generalized to many prepositions) is similar to those proposed in Kayne (1993; 1998) for various constructions involving possession, negation, Only 7'even 7'too', focus, scope and antecedent-contained deletion. Many syntactic relations that could atfirst glance be expressed in terms of merger (sisterhood) turn out to be better expressed in terms of attraction.