Rethinking Scandinavian verb movement

This paper reconsiders the distribution of verb movement in Scandinavian in light of new data from Norwegian and Icelandic. The main claim is that Regional Northern Norwegian displays optional verb movement to the inflectional domain, whereas Icelandic has no independent verb movement at all to this domain, contrary to standard assumptions: All verb movement in Icelandic is to the CP domain of the clause. A remnant movement approach to verb movement is explored and it is proposed that movement to the CP domain and movement corresponding to V-to-I movement differ in amount of material pied-piped. The analysis presented captures the observed differences between the two movements. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.