Volume 33, Issue 1 - Special Issue: On labels, Guest Editor: Željko Bošković

The article provides a uniform account of a number of locality effects, in particular, the Subject Condition, the Adjunct Condition, Richards’s (2001) tucking in effect, and the full Comp-trace paradigm, including (in addition to the basic cases) relative and extraposed clauses, the impossibility of short subject topicalization, French que-qui alternation, and the effect of wh-movement on agreement in languages like Kinande. The account is based on a proposal that there is a difference in the timing of labeling between the basic case where a head and a phrase merge and the case where two phrases merge, as well as a particular labeling-based approach to antilocality, which has rather different empirical effects from the previous approaches to antilocality.

Chomsky 2013 argues that D of an external argument in Spec TP is in principle as close to C as T is. Assuming that “inversion depends upon locality independent of category,” T and D should therefore compete with each other as candidates for raising to C in English questions, yet only T so raises. Chomsky takes this to indicate that the external argument is in its base position, Spec, vP, when C is merged. Our paper argues that this approach cannot generalize to account for why only V+v and not D of an external argument can raise to T in V-v-to-T languages. It also has major difficulties accounting for a well-known asymmetry: T raises to C only in English non-subject questions. We conclude that head-movement is sensitive to categorial and other features of lexical items, contra the claims of Chomsky 2013.

As Chomsky (2004, 2005) notes, a theory with set-Merge allows this operation to apply in two different ways, externally (to two separate objects) and internally (one object contained within the other). Here we extend Chomsky’s form of argument to pair-Merge; i.e. in the absence of some stipulation preventing it, it too can apply in two ways: internally and externally. We will argue that external pair-Merge of heads overcomes a paradox concerning bridge verb constructions. In the final section we note that external pair-Merge of heads is, in effect, a “presyntactic” morphological (“word formation”) rule entailed by current syntactic theory. The extent to which the standard theory of morphological operations can be subsumed by external pair-Merge of heads, further unifying syntax and (aspects of) morphology is left for further research.

Combining the labeling algorithm of Chomsky (2013) with bare phrase structure raises the question of how heads (simple or complex) and phrases can be distinguished. I propose a notational device which draws the distinction in a way which solves technical problems for the labeling algorithm. Focusing on phrasal movement, I show how the “halting problem” for wh-movement, and in particular the freezing effects arising in criterial positions, can be derived from labeling and a maximality principle, restricting movement to maximal elements with a given label. Looking then at head movement, I argue that it can be made consistent with the No Tampering condition, and work out the labeling algorithm for structures derived by head movement. Finally, I argue that the ban against excorporation in head movement can be analyzed as a case of freezing, and traced back, much as freezing in phrasal movement, to the maximality principle relativized to the head – phrase distinction.

This paper explores the labeling mechanism in Japanese and other languages that lack φ-feature agreement. It is proposed in Chomsky (2013) that φ-feature sharing between the subject and T makes the labeling of finite clauses possible. It has also been assumed that Case is required for and valued through φ-feature agreement. (See, for example, Chomsky 2008.) These raise fundamental questions about the syntax of languages without φ-feature agreement.Adopting Bošković’s (2007) proposal to divorce Case valuation from φ-feature agreement, I argue that suffixal Case and predicate inflection make phrases opaque for search, and serve to aid labeling in Japanese. The hypothesis provides explanations for the outstanding syntactic properties of the language, such as multiple subject sentences, semantically vacuous scrambling, compound verbs with specific constraints, and argument ellipsis. The analysis of argument ellipsis is based on Richards’ (2003) hypothesis that elided constituents count as heads in computation. In Section 5, I extend the analysis to other phenomena, including N’-ellipsis in Japanese and object ellipsis in Chinese. I also consider the labeling of finite clauses in Malayalam, which has neither subject agreement nor suffixal nominative Case. I suggest that Case valuation, instead of φ-feature agreement, creates the configuration of feature sharing for labeling.

This paper proposes that a particular conception of the Spell-Out operation provides a hitherto unnoticed way of determining a label of otherwise unlabeled syntactic objects. It is shown that this proposal simplifies the grammar and gains several theoretical and empirical consequences, eliminating certain unnecessary complications in Chomsky’s (2013) framework where some instances of movement are forced by the need to label. More specifically, we point out that Chomsky’s basic idea behind the implementation of labeling through movement, which assumes that a copy left behind by movement is invisible to minimal search, is not only incompatible with the copy theory of movement but also violates the No Tampering Condition. We also point out that his claim that movement is required for labeling has a redundancy problem regarding the motivation of movement, which should be avoided in the Minimalist Program. Then, we argue that the problems are easily solved if we ensure that a singleton set left after the application of Spell-Out is automatically converted into its single member. The proposed system of labeling that makes use of Spell-Out not only removes some unnecessary complications of Chomsky (2013) but also gives several novel answers to classical questions concerning the binarity of phrase structures and the structures of small clauses and there -constructions.