There is only one way to agree
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Hedde Zeijlstra,
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.
©[2012] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
