Verb movement and coordination in a dynamic theory of licensing

Over the last decade generative grammar has moved away from using phrase structure rules s the basic specifiers of syntactic structure; instead, the theory has come to see phrase structure s the instantiation of a number of licensing relations, chiefly θ-role assignment, case, agreement, and predication. The licensing of phrase structure has, however, been conceived in a static way: although the elements being licensed may move in the course of a derivation in order to reach the positions in which licensing takes place, the positions themselves are fixed for each relation. In this article we explore the consequences of abandoning this static view, and taking instead a dynamic approach in which the licensing positions themselves may change in the course of a derivation. In essence, we will argue that a licensing relation holding between two elements α and β is satisfied whenever α arid β are in the relevant configuration (for example head-complement, head-specifier); there is no motivation for restricting the satisfaction of the relation to the underlying positions of α and/or . Instead, we will show that something close to the converse is true: given economy assumptions along the lines of Chomsky (1991, 1992), a licensing relation will necessarily be satisfied by the highest position in a chain at which the relevant licensing configuration occurs. Consequently, a given trace can appear only if at least one of the licensing relations in which it participates is not also satisfied by some position higher in its chain. In what follows we will show that this new view of how structure is licensed straightforwardly accounts for a wide r nge of otherwise problematic data. We focus initially on a well-known problem concerning coordination in the