When a verb or verb phrase is fronted from a clause lacking any other verbs either a copy of the displaced verb occurs or a dummy verb ‘do’ is inserted. Most languages employ the same strategy for both verb and verb phrase fronting. Here, I present two African languages, Asante Twi and Limbum, where displacement of a single verb results in a verb copy while a full verb phrase triggers do-support when fronted. Both V and VP-fronting show the same syntactic properties within each language. A reverse pattern of verb doubling with VP-fronting but do-support with V-fronting is unattested. I propose an analysis of both strategies in terms of different orders of application between post-syntactic head movement and copy deletion. In interaction with the type of V-movement, remnant VP or head-to-spec movement, this derives all three attested patterns to the exclusion of the unattested one.

Most known languages seem to follow the intuitive and economical implication that if they show a repair such as verb doubling or do-support when just the verb is fronted, they also show that same repair when the verb is fronted together with its internal argument(s) (provided that the language has both types of fronting). In this paper, I present data from Asante Twi, where the verb is doubled in the former case but there is do-support in the latter instead. I argue that the attested patterns can be accounted for under the Copy Theory of Movement by introducing different orders of the operations Chain Reduction (CR) and head movement (HM) at PF (analogous to what Schoorlemmer 2012 proposed for Chain Reduction and Local Dislocation). CR either bleeds HM giving rise to consistent do-support (as in German) or counterbleeds it leading to consistent verb doubling (as in Hebrew). The Asante Twi pattern is a result of the interaction of the bleeding order with Ā-head movement, where the bleeding effect of the order is neutralised by the inability of Ā-head movement to form chains, which is rooted in the Chain Uniformity Condition (Chomsky 1995). The account provides a unified minimalist analysis of verb doubling and do-support in verbal fronting, which derives all attested patterns but correctly precludes the derivation of the unattested reverse Asante Twi pattern.

A considerable number of German dialects exhibit doubled R-pronouns with pronominal adverbs (dadamit, dadafür, dadagegen). At first sight, this type of in situ replication seems to be completely redundant since its occurrence is independent of R-pronoun extraction/movement. The main purpose of this paper is to account for (i) the difference between dialects with regard to replication of R-pronouns and (ii) why an (apparently redundant) process of replication occurs. Following Müller (2000a), who considers R-pronouns to be a repair phenomenon, we present an analysis in the framework of Optimality Theory. We argue that replication of R-pronouns is a consequence of different rankings of universal requirements like e.g. the Inclusiveness Condition, the Lexical Integrity Hypothesis and Antilocality and that the interaction of these constraints results in the occurrence of replication.

The Final-over-Final Condition has emerged as a robust and explanatory generalization for a wide range of phenomena (Biberauer et. al. 2014; Sheehan et al. 2017). In this paper, we argue that it also holds in another domain, nominalization. In languages which show overt nominalization of VPs, we find that one word order is routinely unattested, namely a head-initial VP with a suffixal nominalizer. This typological gap can be accounted for by the FOFC, if we allow it to hold within mixed extended projections. Furthermore, we show that this view also makes correct predictions about agentive nominalizations, as well as nominalized serial verb constructions.

Syncretism has been reported to have the peculiar property of repairing violations of syntactic constraints, e.g. with agreement (Schütze 2003, Bhatt & Walkow 2013) and case matching (Citko 2005, van Craenenbroeck 2012). This paper puts forward the view that in one well‐reported instance of syncretism repair of case‐matching violations with ATB‐movement, this repair follows directly from the nature of ATB movement. We pursue a novel movement‐based analysis in which ATB movement involves the actual fusion of two syntactic objects, via intersection of feature sets. As well as deriving the one‐to‐many relation between fillers and gaps in ATB, we show how the ‘repair’ effect of syncretism with case matching violations follows naturally under this approach.