On forked chains in ATB-movement: Defending and newly implementing a traditional notion

In this paper, I argue for the existence of 'forked chains' in Across-the-board movement. Phenomena from German like across the board WH-copying, case matching and remnant movement provide evidence for their existence, which runs contrary to a recent trend in the literature to deny the existence of forked chains. As for the analytical implementation, I suggest recasting ATB in terms of minimal search for the displaced element, applying to a strictly symmetrical, exocentric syntactic object. In conjunction with an independently suggested parallelism constraint on coordination, ATB emerges as the ambiguous identification of a copy in phase edges.