In this paper, I reconsider the nature of sam (a Polish counterpart to Russian and Serbo-Croatian sam, German selbst, Italian solo, Danish selv), a lexical item generally assumed to be adjectival. First, I focus on its use as an adnominal intensifier and argue that in this function it should be considered pronominal. Since intensifying sam has a history of appearing in analyses propagating the DP Hypothesis, my proposal sheds some light on these issues and leads to bigger questions concerning the structure of Polish nominals, in particular whether they project DP or not. Answers to these questions constitute the second part of the paper, where I argue that D equals Person (hence DP/PersonP) and that it is universally present in Polish nominals. I draw on the evidence from Left Branch Extractions and adjunct extractions and show that, while such extractions are quite freely available in Polish, they are nevertheless blocked whenever in the presence of overt D/Person heads, just like in languages with articles, projecting DP. I further show that the difference between Polish and English with respect to adjectival LBE reduces to the employment of distinct case-checking strategies and agreement options.
In this paper, I propose an alternative account of feature checking/valuation based solely on categorial features. The main assumption is that lexical heads have an exclusively lexical feature matrix, whereas functional heads have an exclusively functional feature matrix. The next assumption is that only lexical features allow strictly local feature checking/valuation (i.e. under Agree); functional features, on the other hand, require a syntactic operation (Merge or Move) to check/value their functional features. Interaction between functional heads (Probes) and lexical ones (Goals) is made possible only via the mediating functional heads c-selecting the lexical ones (e.g. D selects N/NP, v selects V/VP). The mediating functional heads provide lexical heads/ categories with a functional layer indispensable for "communication" with the functional Probes (as in Chomsky 1999: 9). The analysis proposed here accounts for the facts traditionally ascribed to the Extended Projection Principle (EPP). I show on the basis of English and Icelandic data that the EPP-effects result from categorial functional feature checking and cannot be reduced to either Case or agreement; rather, Case and agreement are intertwined in the processes of categorial feature checking/valuation and constitute their output, but crucially not their goal.
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