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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton August 21, 2012

There is only one way to agree

  • Hedde Zeijlstra, EMAIL logo
From the journal The Linguistic Review

Abstract

Current minimalism takes syntactic operations Agree and Move to be triggered by underlying feature checking requirements (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2001, Pesetsky & Torrego 2004). This standard version of Agree/Move suffers from at least five problems: (i) it does not explain the existence of Reverse Agree; (ii) it does not explain the existence of Multiple Agree; (iii) it does not explain the behavior of Concord phenomena; (iv) it does not explain the triggering of intermediate steps in successive cyclic movement; and (v) the [EPP]-feature itself remains unmotivated. Moreover, I argue that two recent proposals (Pesetsky & Torrego 2007, Bošković 2007) solve some, but not all of these problems. Finally, I argue that all these problems disappear once a simpler version of Agree is adopted where uninterpretable features can only be checked if they are c-commanded by a matching interpretable feature and not the other way round.

Published Online: 2012-08-21
Published in Print: 2012-09-07

©[2012] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston

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