Abstract
This book owes its title to a simple idea: words are special because they can provide a label for free when they merge with some other category. An exemplification of this special power of words is introduced by the familiar head-complement configurations. For example, the structure that is created when a verb and a direct object DP are merged receives a label from the verb, namely it is a VP. One idea that unifies the linguistic analyses presented in this book is that a word can provide the label even in case of movement. This has important consequences, because movement of a word is special in one respect: it can “relabel” the structure, namely the structure resulting from movement of a word can have a different label from the one that the structure had before movement. The new label is the one provided by the word that has moved.
Relabeling cases triggered by the movement of a word are pervasive in the syntax of natural languages and their identification sheds lights on phenomena like relativization, successive cyclicity, island phenomena, and Minimality effects.
We discuss the relabeling cases by adopting an explicit theory of labeling that builds on the idea that the label results from the Probing operation (and not from Merge). More precisely, the Probe provides the label. A corollary is that, if no Probe is present, the structure created by Merge remains label-less. This happens in a very restricted, yet important, set of cases.
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