Argument features, clausal structure and the computation.

Författare

Halldor Armann Sigurðsson

Redaktör

Eric Reuland
Tanmoy Bhattacharya
Giorgos Spathas

Summary, in English

This paper claims that case is vP-internally interpretable and that high NP-movement is driven by (minimally) two other ‘forces’: Person checking in a position higher than Tense, and EPP (Fin) checking in a still higher position, ‘Spec,IP’. This is evidenced by ´low’ nominatives, quirky agreement, Stylistic Fronting and expletive-distribution.

Another central claim of the paper is that grammar interprets event features in relation to speech features. In particular, Person drives NP-movement because it computes event participants (cased θ-roles) in relation to speech participants, much as Tense links event time to speech time. As evidenced by both tense interpretation and pronoun interpretation, the finite clause is a Speech Phrase, SP, containing syntactic speech features.

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