Agreement, case and movement Summary

We have taken a look at Chomsky’s recent work on case, agreement and A-movement. We saw that agreement plays an integral role in nominative case assignment, in that nominative case is assigned to a nominal which agrees in person and number with a finite T. We argued that some features enter the derivation already valued (e.g. the tense feature of T and the person/number -features of nominals), whereas others (e.g. the -features of T and the case feature of nominals) are initially unvalued and are assigned values in the course of the derivation by operations like Feature-Copying (7) and Nominative Case Assignment (9). We claimed that interpretable features enter the derivation already valued, whereas those features which are initially unvalued are uninterpretable. We saw that agreement and case-marking involve a relation between an active probe and an active goal, and that probe and goal are only active if they carry one or more uninterpretable features (e.g. uninterpretable -features or case features). We also saw that uninterpretable features have to be deleted in the course of the derivation by a Feature-Deletion operation (14), in order to ensure that they do not feed into the semantic component and thereby cause the derivation to crash (because they are illegible in the semantic component), and that only a -complete  can delete an uninterpretable feature of ß. We suggested that expletive it enters the derivation with uninterpretable third-person and singular-number features, and that these value, delete and in turn are deleted by those of the auxiliary in sentences such as It is said that he has taken bribes. However, we noted that weather it is quasi-referential, and may originate as an argument internally within VP. We looked at Chomsky’s claim that there is merged directly in spec-TP, and serves as a probe whose uninterpretable third-person feature is deleted via agreement with a -complete T. We noted that such an analysis has consequences (for the nature of probes and the inactivation of features) which may not seem desirable, and outlined an alternative analysis of expletives as originating within VP. We outlined Chomsky’s agreement-based theory of movement under which movement involves an agreement relation between an active probe with an [EPP] feature and an active goal, and we suggested in (45) that the [EPP] feature of T can be satisfied either by merger of an expletive in spec-TP, or by movement of the closest active matching goal to spec-TP, with merger/movement of the relevant constituent in spec-TP deleting the [EPP] feature of T. We looked at the syntax of control infinitives, claiming that their PRO subject is assigned null case via agreement with a -complete T carrying null (non-finite) tense. We went on to argue that data relating to the distribution of floating modifiers suggest that T in control clauses has an [EPP] feature which triggers movement of PRO to spec-TP. We argued that T in other kinds of infinitive clause (e.g. the infinitival complements of raising, passive and ECM predicates) is defective in that although it carries uninterpretable [EPP] and person features (the latter serving to make T active), it lacks the number feature carried by a -complete T in finite and control clauses. We saw that such an analysis entails that A-movement takes place in a successive-cyclic fashion, with the moved argument being raised to become the subject of a lower TP before raising to become the subject of a higher TP. We went on to consider the possibility that all movement operations are local (and hence apply in a successive-cyclic fashion in complex structures) and noted that this implies that A-bar movement operations like wh-movement are also successive-cyclic in complex sentences (but said we would postpone detailed discussion of this).