Feature inheritance versus extended projections

Abstract

This article shows that the empirical data that Chomsky (2008) provides in favor of feature inheritance and parallel movement are rather suspect, and that there are both empirical and conceptual reasons to reject this implementation of the idea that the formal features in C and T originate in a single head position. This does not imply, however, that the latter idea should be completely rejected. This paper argues that there are also reasons to assume that the relevant features all originate in the T-head, and that the C-position comes (or rather: may come) into existence as a result of the remerge of T as a specific instantiation of the formation of extended projections in the sense of Grimshaw (1997). We will conclude by showing that the extended projection approach is preferred to the feature inheritance approach in terms of optimization/economy given that for subject-initial sentences, CP-structures are normally harmonically bounded by TP-structures due to the fact that they invoke additional violations of *MOVE and *MERGE.

On the position of subjects in Spanish: Evidence from code-switching

“…For example, Richards (2007) presented conceptual arguments for the necessity of FI, but den Dikken (2014) criticized the concept as being motivated merely by theory-internal concerns. Many other scholars have proposed reformulations of the details of FI (Ouali 2008;Biberauer & Roberts 2009;Gallego 2014;Broekhuis 2016;Shim 2016). What all these approaches share is that they assume a close connection between C and T, in which, by some mechanism, features are shared between the heads.…”

Superiority Effects in Minimalism: A Case Study of a-Movement

“…Thus, the wh-phrase is not extracted out of the subject. We refer the reader to Mizuguchi (2009) for details (see also Broekhuis (2013) and van Craenenbroeck and den Dikken (2006) for the argument that adnominal PPs are moved from NP/subject-external positions). Given this adjunction analysis of adnominal PPs, the well-formedness of (26) follows without assuming successive-cyclic A-movement.…”