A principled exception to the Müller-Takano Generalization: A belated follow-up to Richards (2004)

According to the Müller-Takano Generalization (Müller 1993; Takano 1994), a remnant that contains a trace resulting from a given type of movement cannot itself undergo that same type of movement. I argue that Richards’ (2004) data from Bulgarian “Russian-doll” wh-questions constitute principled exceptions to this generalization under an approach that derives it from a minimality condition on movement paths. Alternative approaches to the generalization have a harder time deriving such exceptions.