Verb movement

Definition
Verb movement is a movement of a verb to a c-commanding head position, e.g. I ( INFL) and C ( COMP). In many languages the verb moves to I to pick up morphological inflection ( tense and/or agreement).

Example
In Dutch (i) the uninflected verb kus is moved to I, and adjoined to it, to pick up the affix -t, and the resulting complex subsequently moves to COMP.

(i) a [CP [C'e [IP Jan [I' [VP Margriet kus ] [I-t] ] ] ] ] b [CP [C'[I[V kus]k [I -t]]j [IP Jan [I' [VP Margriet tk] tj ] ] ] ]

An alternative to (i) is the movement of a fully inflected verb to (and possibly substituting for) an empty I position in order to 'check' the tense and/or agreement features. Verb movement is sometimes called 'verb raising' in distinction to the lowering of the I to the V-position (e.g. in English). Verb movement is an instance of head movement. A special case of verb movement is Verb raising.

Links

 * Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics