Syntactic labels and their derivations

There has been some interest in minimalist theories in deriving category label from a head of phrase without having to stipulate them directly. This paper investigates syntactic labels and their derivation, and considers whether the head of a phrase and the label it supplies are fixed and unique throughout a derivation or whether they can change from one step of a derivation to the next. The response is that a minimalist version of the familiar Projection Principle is required to answer this question negatively, and produces some evidence from selection in English and in Tongan light verb constructions to support this view.