This paper develops a new approach to a family of hierarchy effect-inducing configurations, with a focus on Person Case Constraint (PCC) effects, dative-nominative configurations, and copula constructions. The main line of approach in the recent literature is to attribute these effects to failures of φ-Agree or, more specifically, failures of nominal licensing or case checking. We propose that the problem in these configurations is unrelated to nominal licensing, but is instead the result of a probe participating in more than one Agree dependency, a configuration we refer to as feature gluttony. Feature gluttony does not in and of itself lead to ungrammaticality, but rather can create irresolvably conflicting requirements for subsequent operations. We argue that in the case of clitic configurations, a probe which agrees with more than one DP creates an intervention problem for clitic-doubling. In violations involving morphological agreement, gluttony in features may result in a configuration with no available morphological output.

This dissertation develops a comprehensive theory of selective opacity, syntactic con gurations in which one and the same syntactic domain (typically a clause) is transparent to some operations, but opaque to others. The prime example of selective opacity are nite clauses in English, which are transparent to A-movement, but opaque to A-movement. Following and extending the previous literature, this thesis argues that selective opacity is much more widespread than it is usually taken to be in that it extends beyond the A/A-distinction and even to syntactic dependencies that do not involve movement.From an empirical point of view, I argue that selective opacity exhibits intriguing metageneralizations, which become evident once selective opacity across constructions and languages is treated as a uniform phenomenon. These two meta-generalizations are what I call Upward Entailment and the Height-Locality Connection. Upward Entailment states that if a clause of a given structural size is opaque to some operation, then structurally larger clauses are likewise opaque to this operation. The Height-Locality Connection states that the locality of a movement type is related to the height of the landing site of that movement type within the clausal spine in that viii movement types that land in a structurally high position are able to escape more domains than movement types that target a structurally lower position.The core theoretical proposal of the dissertation is that selective opacity is the manifestation of a constraint on the locality of probes. I propose that probes have characteristic Horizons, which delimit their search space. The crucial aspect of horizons is that they can di er between probes.As a result, the opacity of a domain can be relative to the probe conducting the search. I argue that this is what underlies locality di erences between movement types, between movement and agreement, and between di erent types of agreement dependencies that do not involve movement.I demonstrate how a wide array of selective opacity e ects and complex interactions between them can be derived from this account. I also demonstrate how meta-generalizations of selective opacity are derived in this framework.Finally, I explore the consequences of horizons for more familiar concepts of syntactic locality like phases. I show that horizons coexist with CP phases, but that they are incompatible with vP phases. Independent experimental evidence for this conclusion is provided and I reassess previous arguments in support of vP phases.

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In this paper, we subject to closer scrutiny one particularly influential recent argument in favour of the long-movement analysis of tough-constructions. Hartman (2011, 2012a, 2012b) discovered that experiencer PPs lead to ungrammaticality in tough-constructions, but not in expletive constructions. He attributes this ungrammaticality to defective intervention of A-movement, a movement step crucially postulated only in the long-movement analysis. He takes this as evidence that tough-constructions are derived via long movement. We make the novel observation that a PP intervention effect analogous to that in tough-constructions also arises in constructions that do not involve A-movement, namely pretty-predicate constructions and gapped degree phrases. Consequently, the intervention effect does not provide an argument for an A-movement step in tough-constructions or for the long-movement analysis, but rather for the base-generation analysis. We develop a uniform account of the intervention effects as a semantic-type mismatch. In particular, we propose that what unifies tough-constructions, pretty-predicate constructions, and gapped degree phrases is that they all have an embedded clause that is a null-operator structure. Introducing an experiencer PP into these constructions creates an irresolvable semantic-type mismatch. As such, we argue for a reassessment of what appears to be a syntactic locality constraint as an incompatibility in the semantic composition.