An argument against the syntactic nature of verb movement

Recent research into the nature of periphrasis converges on the view that periphrastic forms occupy cells in morphological paradigms. This paper argues that the relative past (“perfect”) in Dutch should be understood as periphrastic in this sense. Adopting the current minimalist view on the relation between morphology and syntax, in which inflectional morphemes are not generated in syntax but realized postsyntactically in a morphological component, the analysis leads to the conclusion that the relative past’s auxiliary is not an element of narrow syntax either. The paper argues that this approach simplifies the syntactic analysis of Dutch verb clusters. The upshot of the analysis is that since auxiliaries undergo verb-second, verb movement must be a postsyntactic operation, as suggested by Chomsky (2001).