Syntax II - Class VI

Johni isi considered ti intelligent - see diagram.

locality stuff.
chapter 3 in the black book.

more palatable arguments for minimalist program introduced later.

a bit of background why important to delve into the discussion.,
we advantage of knowing what Chomsky did with NP mobvement in Barriers.

added one crucual ingredient at end of last class. cant be whole sacrosant analysis of passives, becauses reason to beleive passives to not just lack external argument, ie. vaccuumed up entirely, unlike in case of middles (this book reads easily *deliberately), where see no agent in imddle. But can say "this book was torn to peices deliberately." And control seems to be syntactically constrained, at least by obligatory control. (and cannot easily intepret this as arbitrary control "the ship was sunk to collect the insurance money," does not seem that some arbitrary person will collect the insurance money,

then we need a controller for that PRO. and that would need to be an empty category of some sort. the collector of insurance money are the implicit agents of the sinking event. (could also have explicit byphrase - e.g. was sunk by the owner to collect the insurance money.) by passives always assume implicit agent. must be some empty category representing this implicit agent. (last week,called this Pro, since did not want to specifiy How to identify it - whether this was PRO or pro.) Where put it? Where ALWAYS put recipient -inside the VP. see diagram 2.
But problem because V' will be barrier unless use spec-head and head-head agreement, but then John was killed would always be John committing suicide.

also *relativized* minimality problem, because Pro is in an A position, and moving trace to Johni


Guasti - suggested straightforward wat- a theta role was assigned to this position (Pro), so could not have landed there anyway, so should not be a barrier.
Idea is always "make the shortest *possible* move, and let us take *possible* seriously.
so she further relativized relativized minimality, saying that an intervening theta-position, cannot land in.
is this true generally?

Now enter chapter 3 program of minimalist program.
we will see that it is NOT generally possible to get out of the difficulty by referring to thematic content of the positions.
note that has the desirable effect (once we have this in place) that we do not have to go down Guasti's line, and refer to the theta-criterion. and theta-criterion is simply baggage. don't need it for phonology, semantics, etc.. but rather we have stipulated it in order to get certain results.

Are situations when go from t to A across an A position, where intervening A is a theta-bar position, where it is OK.

First step to take is:
we are familiar w fact that subjects can agree with finite verbs for phi features . person and number (not gender). Hebrew has gender agreement with finite verbs. In other langs, perhaps phi features involved will be diff subset of those phi. That is agreement.

it turns out not just subject that can agree. also objects. need look beyond english, to Romance langs. in fairly narrow circumscribable

when object is clitic pronoun, when object is NP moved (in passive), and WH-moved.
in 50, gave example for French, in WH-movement - how many tables did you repaint?
and here, not just orthoggraphically represented but phonologically real.
es ending. Plural and Feminine.
thus get gender agreement. (the e- and is pronounced)
plural agreement is orthographically real. (but the s is not pronounced)
thus, in one of the phi features.
but how could it?
subject-verb agreement happens usually under spec-head agreement, but this not true buy object!
see diagram (3).
base generated in complement position of the Verb, and cannot move it to subject position, because that will be where subject is.
bery easy to move to spec position for functional position, but not for lexical position.
could create some functional position to move into. which position? could it be spec-IP?

cannot be that agreement happens in IP, because as-tu agreement. separated by tu, so not in same area as repeint.
So need two positions for agreement, one for subject-head agreement, and one for object agreement.

Infl realy has 2 things dangling under it. Tense and about agreement.
I - T
|
Agr

Thus really schizo creature. imagine dissolve this hybridity.
then would need to recognize independence of T and Agr.

Think of Infl as nation-state, with multiple ethnicities within. Dissolve, create two other nation-states.

No more IP, but TP and AgrP.
One recognize ArgP (Agreement Phrase).
Then there is AgrP for subjects, and AgrP for objects. AgrP never existed before for objects for Chomsky, because no object agreement for English.

Now, 3 things. TP, AgrP for subjects, AgrP for objects.

Heirarchy?
Mirror Principle (Mark Baker) - in morphology
syntactic deriviations mirror morhphological derivations and v.v.
(4) have 3 heads over VP.
as move, *left adjoin* to each.
[VZ]
[[VZ]Y]
[[[VZ]Y]X]
heirarchy mirrors morphological bracketing

could also imagine would *right adjoin* to its host every step along the way
[ZV]
[Y[ZV]]
[X[Y[ZV]]]

in wihch case preserve linear order morphological as internal organization.
in both cases, what is closer morphologically is closer in the tree.

when we look at the facts, get quite a lot of chaos, but certain regularity.
contrain self to prefixing case (right adjoin in lang Xhosa, a Bantu lang spoken in S Africa)

u- mama u-ya-wu -phek-a um-ngqusho
noun classes in Banta- u is on of them
1a-mother 2a-Agr-PresentTense-3agr-COOK-Asp 3A-samp

mother cooks samo
intereseting this is u (2aAgr) and wu (3agr), with tense in the middle.
this is right-adjoining.
a prefixing system.

In Quechua, spoken in Ecuador, that does suffixing, so left-adjoining.
riku-wa-rqa-nki
means:
see-1sg (object) -past-secondperson Z (subject)
"you saw me"

thus, what is closest to the stem? Once again, the object agreement closest AgrO. then T, then ArgS.
AgrS always farthest away from the stem.
see diagam (5).
onject moves to spec-AgrOP, subject moves successive cyclically first to spec-Tp, then to spec-AgrSP.
now, need not be same verb that subject and object agrees with (e.g. French), but in the two languages we have seen, for same verb.

Second advantage, can finally go back and assimilate assignment of case to sytax and the object. before, only under *m-command* could we assign nominative case under govenment. But see elsewhere that m-command not desirable. Now, we can assimilate accusative and nominative case assignment.
nominitive is assigned under spec-head agreement in AgrSP, and Accusative case is assigne under spec-head agreement in AgrOP. Both are thus assigned in spec-head agreement in AgrPs.

in many langs, get either agreement or case via either marking on the verb ... seem to be two sides of exactly the same coin. which makes sense since this is what is happening here.

even w/o that reason, we would still be happy with the result for case by itself, namely that now we have a unified account of structural case.
can even draw genitive case into this.
"In John's book" or better, "in yesterday;s newspaper"- no thematic relation, is structural case, can do same thing.

gave derivation on the board.

but how is this derivation legitimate.
and how come that one was legitimite and not diagram (6).
if that were legit,
could be able to say
"John kissed Mary,"
and it would mean Mary kissed John.
not written in stone that object always gets nom case?
so cannot pick on this as a reason.
this cannot be quite it, because not set in stone that sub has Nom case and object gets Nom. cases when they get the opposite.
must appeal to s/t else.

Must make sure that (5), with is AgrO, converges and (6) does not.

In (6), going from A position to next avaliable one for subject.
But in (5), crossing overs position, some things are npt local.
In (6), first onbect movement is nonlocal. But then, in 5, also nonlocal movement.
But one of the crossovers is a Guasti (object to AgrOp) answer, since intervening pos was assigned theta, but for subject movement, have problem: spec-AgrOP and spec-TP are A positions which are theta-bar. Thus Guasti insufficient. passing over potential landing site.

So we do not seem to making shortest possible move.
In the enormously technical discussion in chap 3, Chomsky finds a solution. Perhaps trite and trivial, perhaps even repulsive. Make two pos that seem not equally far away to be eqqually far away from the launch pad.
He calls euqally far away "equidistance."

Want spec-AgrOP and spec-TP to be equidistant.
under certain circumstances and *those alone* will be equidistant.

similar to trick Chomsky exploited in Barriers. an interplay between NP movement and head movement that makes this NP-movement licensed.

Need a few defs first. On page 17.
1) need to make two pos equidistance from launch-pad.


(55) euqidistant if they are in same minimal domain.
(56) domain = The m-command domain of the head

as diagramed in (7)

(57) *MIN* domain - cross out all from domain that dominated by anything else in same domain. So in diagram (7), keep YP, ZP, and disregard all else.

Can do same for Z. Min domain would be RP and QP.
Note that diff color circles around YP and RP.

On the tree (5), want to move subject into spect-TP position. But want spec-AgrOP and spec-TP in same minimal domain.
Note: minimal domain of a head is simply the spec and the complement.
But want them to be in same minimal domain.

Have in mind that domain and minimal domain defined for *chains*, and if can construct non-trivial chain, who known what might happen?

When take AgrO to T, create chain (AgrO, t).
The head is under T, and the foot of the chain is under AgrO.

Will not only ignore T, T', TP, but also AgrO, AgrO', AgrOP.
Now, spec-TP, spec-AgrOp, and complement and all under it are the domain.
min domain will be spec-TP, spec-Agr-OP, and VP complement of AgrO.

min domain of non-trivial chain that it, contains spec of head of the chain (=landing site), spec of foot of chain (where started out), and complement of foot. And that was what was cirled.
Note that both spec-TP and spec-AgrOP are both blue-circled, so they are in the same minimal domain. Thus they are *equidistant* from any position in the tree.

can do same thing for object, but only if V moves to AgrO, thus making chain, and can compute minimal domain so that see is equidistant.

Powerpoint presentation.

episode 1
overt movement of both NPs in a transitive clause
crossing paths derivation.
perform had movement, because no stationary head can have minimal domain with two specs in it. because any head has only one specifier.

Note: when move V, have V adjoined to it, so have AgrO, and under it, V and AgrO.

T has AgrO and T under it, and meanwhile AgrO has V and AgrO under it.

One more thing before go.
In order to make this happen, must be two head movements. V must move, and then AgrO must move. so verb must eventually be included in this complex. So predict here for overt object movement followed by overt subject movement to be legit, verb must surface quite high up in the tree. that derives Honbag?'s generalization, Swedish linguist, who identified fact that in Scandanavian, verb can only leave VP if verb ultimately surfaces as the very least in T. Illustrated in (59). But for now, do the assignment, but will be greatly helped with assignment by doing the reading for this sections, and reading for "important consequences" and "structure building..."

still need to rule out derivation on the right (6). answer will of course be that in this derivation, it is impsiible to get spec-TP, spec-AgrOP and spec-VP in same minimal domain. And one of questions is why they cannot be.