Volume 18, Issue 2

The Participial Relative in Modern Hebrew and Standard Arabic is a mixed verboadjectival construction. Internally a verbal construction, its external distribution and function is that of an adjectival predicate. The discussion in this paper focuses on the mechanism of predicate formation at work in this construction. It is shown that this mechanism never involves a binding relationship between a null operator and a syntactic variable. Rather, predicate formation in participial relatives is achieved either by the binding of a resumptive pronoun or else by the operation of a certain theta-theoretic mechanism. The variation between Hebrew and Standard Arabic participial relatives, regarding the binding of resumptive pronouns and the admissibility of an overt subject, is derived from the attribution of a certain feature specification to a particular functional head.

This paper presents some new arguments in favour of the biclausal analysis of the so-called periphrastic tenses. It is argued that in these constructions, the main verbs as well as the auxiliaries are marked for tense. It is also claimed that every clause contains two temporal heads: a higher T(Past) and a lower T(Future). The biclausality of periphrastic tenses is then a consequence of the way in which tense is represented in syntax: with only two temporal heads per clause, many complex tenses have to be formed by means of embedding. The analysis thus involves a revision of the tense systems set up by Reichenbach (1947) and Vikner (1985), and also of the proposal concerning the universal inventory of temporal heads put forth by Cinque (1999).

In developing and elaborating the theory of Attract -F, Chomsky (1995) proposes the mechanism of Generalized Pied-Piping. According to Chomsky, when a formal feature of a head H attracts a matching feature of a category Ψ, other formal features of a category Ψ can be moved automatically, without any cost in terms of the general economy condition, to the target H together with the feature that is attracted to H. In this paper it will be demonstrated, contra Chomsky's (1995) proposal, that the application of Generalized Pied-Piping should be somehow constrained by the economy condition as long as the computation involved in the grammar of the human language (what Chomsky 1995 calls C HL ) is conducted only in a strictly derivational manner. This paper, therefore, claims that Generalized Pied-Piping, just like Move/Attract , is a kind of syntactic operation subject to the general economy condition under the view that C HL is strictly derivational.