Head movement, passive, and antipassive in English

This thesis develops a theory of 'short' head movement, defined as movement of a head X0 (e.g., verb, preposition, morpheme) from a lexical position (e.g., V, P) to a position no higher than the highest extended projection v of V, and investigates the manner in which it interacts with (and is constrained by) the valency reducing operations Passive and Antipassive in English. Passive and Antipassive are taken to be purely syntactic operations which manipulate the feature matrices of the verbs to which they apply, essentially by adding and/or deleting features. Two types of head movement are proposed: (i) movement of the substitution type, which does not result in overt morphology (e.g., V to v movement; V to V movement), and (ii) movement of the adjunction type, which does produce overt morphology (e.g., Preposition Incorporation). Among the major proposals made in this thesis are (1) Active verbs occupy a position in overt syntax higher than that of passive verbs in English, (2) English has a non-morphological active-antipassive alternation, and (3) dative shift/applicativization involves VP internal passivization.