Volume 41, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Workspace, MERGE and Labelling; Guest Editors: Victor Junnan Pan, Mamoru Saito and Yuqiao Du

By examining local subject A’-movement, the paper argues for a split IP and a contextual approach to the EPP where its locus is not a fixed, unique position, but varies depending on the syntactic context. The landing site of subject wh-movement ( who left ) is argued to be lower than non-subject wh-movement ( who did he leave ) but higher than regular subjects ( Amy left ). Quirky subjects are argued to be lower than agreeing subjects, with a generalization proposed regarding their availability. The overall account is extended to many cases, including V-2 in Germanic, subject-restricted relativizations, only -subjects, Defaka focus-movement, Hong Kong Sign Language wh-movement, imperative and CP subjects, locative inversion, Singlish non-agreeing subjects, Japanese and Chinese subjects. Regarding the EPP, the paper argues for a contextual approach where, on a par with a contextual approach to phases, there is an EPP domain, with the highest projection in the EPP domain being the locus of the EPP (on a par with the highest projection in a phasal domain being a phase). This conception of the EPP is put into a broader perspective regarding a more general move toward contextuality in syntax.

The FormCopy (FC) analysis of control proposed by Noam Chomsky develops Norbert Hornstein’s movement analysis. This paper points out that there is inconsistency between both analyses and the standard phase theory. Then, it presents a new definition of phase and the PIC that makes reference to ϕ-feature agreement in order to resolve this inconsistency. Minimal Yield (MY) is one of the conditions on Merge that distinguish the FC analysis from the movement analysis. It is a fundamental assumption in the FC analysis but rules out sideward movements employed in the movement analysis. The second part of the paper first introduces Hisatsugu Kitahara’s analysis of “proper binding” effects in terms of MY. Then, it shows that this analysis, together with the newly proposed definition of phase and the PIC, correctly predicts a surprising difference between English and Japanese with respect to the “proper binding” phenomenon. This constitutes further evidence for MY and hence for the FC analysis of control.

This paper proposes a general multi-dimensional derivation model under a free-MERGE system. MERGE indicates the derivational dimensions that participate the computation. Set-MERGE is considered as an operation that keeps the two merge-mates in the same dimension, and Pair-MERGE sends the two merge-mates to two different dimensions. Each dimension has its own Labeling Algorithm (LA); the LA inside one dimension ignores syntactic objects merged from other dimensions. The resulting multi-dimensional structure will then be transferred to the Conceptual-Intentional (C-I) interface. A syntactic object resulted from Pair-MERGE will be interpreted in terms of coordination relation or modification relation. Different possible labelings in a multi-dimensional structure gives rise to different modification possibilities at C-I. C-I can see the competition of different labels, and will exhaust every possibility to decide which labeling gives rise to an appropriate interpretation.

We propose that Merge, both External Merge and Internal Merge, is totally free from Minimal Search, and more specifically, Search Σ to determine the input of Merge only obeys Binarity and the Phase Impenetrability Condition but not Minimal Search (the Minimal Search-free Merge Hypothesis ). We argue that our proposal provides a unified account of various movement restrictions, such as the freezing effect, the that -trace effect, the anti-locality effect, the vacuous movement hypothesis, and the economy of derivation. We also argue that our proposal derives the insights/consequences of Minimal Yield such as ruling out so-called extensions of Merge by limiting the search space at a later stage of a derivation in terms of Binarity and the PIC. We further expand the empirical and theoretical scope of our proposal by considering exceptions to the freezing effect. We suggest that the exceptions can be dealt with by adopting Form Copy.

This paper discusses the concept of weak head in Chomsky’s (2015. Problems of projection: Extensions. In Elisa Di Domenico, Cornelia Hamann & Simona Matteini (eds.), Structures, strategies and beyond: Studies in honour of Adriana Belletti , 3–16. Amsterdam: John Benjamins) sense from a typological perspective. This paper first establishes a novel generalization that large-scale pied-piping is available in a language only if the language has indeterminate pronouns in Kuroda’s (1965. Generative grammatical studies in the Japanese language . Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology dissertation) sense and the clause to be pied-piped is head-final. To deduce this generalization, this paper first offers a labeling theoretic account of large-scale pied-piping. It then proposes that weak heads are (i) heads that have unvalued features and (ii) morpho-phonologically weak. It is shown that the generalization is deduced from this conception of weak heads, given Inaba’s (2011. The morphosyntax of constituent ordering patterns. The Hiroshima University Studies, Graduate School of Letters 71. 43–72) generalization that head-final complementizers are generally affixal. This paper further argues that the proposed conception of weak heads also allows us to deduce Agree from Minimal Search, which is a third factor principle according to Chomsky (2013. Problems of projection. Lingua 130. 33–49), hence minimizes UG.

This paper examines free object order alternation in ditransitives, focusing on Slovenian. It is shown that neither a scrambling nor a base generation analysis is fully satisfactory. A new analysis based on the Labeling Algorithm is proposed, where it is argued that the introduction of a second object creates an ambiguous labeling scenario ({NP,VP}), which has two equivalent resolutions: (i) movement of the VP with the first object inside, or (ii) movement of the second object. This is shown to derive both free object order in the general case and the restrictions on object order in select contexts, as due to the specifics of the VP-movement analysis it is possible for selectional restrictions to filter out either derivation (i) or (ii).