Hither Head Movement: What could we might learn from double modals?

Long-distance head movement has been most clearly observed in verb-fronting phenomena (e.g. Harizanov 2019). Harizanov & Gribanova (2019) posit that T-to-C movement in interrogatives should also be of the long-distance type since such movement exhibits displacement without morphological growth and has interpretive effects. I argue that intraspeaker variation in double modal interrogatives is evidence of this long-distance T-to-C head movement. In a sentence such as “We might could have done that differently”, some speakers can raise either the first modal head “might” or the second modal head “could” in interrogatives, the latter being observably non-local head movement. I show that this movement cannot be reprojective without violating the Extension Condition (Chomsky 1995), and I consider how heads can be targeted specifically when they are moved via Internal Merge. Finally, I discuss interspeaker variation that exists in double-modal interrogatives and possible factors that led to this variation.