Heycock, Caroline and Kroch, Anthony (1993) Verb movement and coordination in a dynamic theory of licensing. Groninger Arbeiten zur Germanistischen Linguistik 36:75-102.
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Over the last decade generative grammar has moved away from using phrase structure rules as the basic specifiers of syntactic structure; instead, the theory has come to see phrase structure as the instantiation of a number of licensing relations, chiefly theta-role assignment, case, agreement, and predication. The licensing of phrase structure has, however, been conceived in a static way: although the elements being licensed may move in the course of a derivation in order to reach the positions in which licensing takes place, the positions themselves are fixed for each relation.
In this paper we explore the consequences of abandoning this static view, and taking instead a dynamic approach in which the licensing positions themselves may change in the course of a derivation. In this paper we develop a theory of how structure is licensed when heads and specifiers move, and then show that this new view of how structure is licensed straightforwardly accounts for a wide range of otherwise problematic data. We focus initially on a well-known problem concerning coordination in the verb-second Germanic languages, that of so-called "SLF" or "subject gap" coordination, and then turn to other facts in these languages and in English, including the syntax of subject questions in English and the distribution of weak pronouns in the V2 Germanic languages.
A shorter version of this paper has appeared in The Linguistic Review 11: 257-283.