Movement's just another word for nothing left to merge

[Detmar Meurers]

Hi Tibor,

    So I would like to ask: Do we find empirical consequences of the idea that
    SLASH only carries LOCAL information?

The assumption that fronted elements only share the LOCAL
information with the trace (or equivalent lexical requirement in
traceless approaches) is used in the analysis of coherence in
German: An obligatorily coherent verbs locally selecting its verbal
complement must form a head cluster with that complement and inherit
its arguments; but if the verbal complement is fronted, it *can*
realize its arguments to form a VP. To capture this, Stefan and I
proposed that the requirement to form a head cluster (i.e. [LEX +])
is not transferred non-locally (i.e. LEX is not a LOCAL feature):

Detmar Meurers (1998): German Partial-VP Fronting Revisited. In:
     Gert Webelhuth, Jean-Pierre Koenig, and Andreas Kathol (eds.):
     Lexical and Constructional Aspects of Linguistic Explanation,
     CSLI Publications.
     http://ling.osu.edu/~dm/papers/hpsg-volume98/pvp-revisited.html

Stefan Müller (1996): Yet Another Paper about Partial Verb Phrase
    Fronting in German. In Proceedings of COLING 96, pages 800-805,
    Copenhagen.
    http://www.cl.uni-bremen.de/~stefan/Pub/pvp.html.en

cf. also the discussion for other partial constituents in:

Kordula De Kuthy & Detmar Meurers (2001): On Partial Constituent
    Fronting in German. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics
    3:3, 2001.
    http://ling.osu.edu/~dm/papers/dekuthy-meurers-jcgl01.html

Schöne Grüße,
Detmar