Head Movement as a Syntactic Operation

Head movement has been believed to problematic in the theory of movement. It violates the Extension Condition and the Least Tampering Condition. In addition, It is falsely assumed to have nothing to do with either semantic or syntactic effects. This eventually leads Chomsky (2000, 2001) to argue that head movement should occur at PF. However, an account of head movement as a PF operation does not hold on the empirical and theoretical ground. It is noted that head movement has semantic or syntactic effects like phrasal movement. Eventually, head movement is not that different from phrasal movement. Thus, head movement may be viewed as feature-driven movement typical of phrasal movement. Moreover, head movement as substitution fares better from both empirical and theoretical perspectives.