Jaume Solà i Pujols - Departament de Filologia Catalana ...

each other: AGR has to be licenced by having an I-subject, and the I-subject needs Case. 89
The idea I want to pursue is the following: once AGR is present in a language, it has to
be licenced by having an I-subject, providing Case to it, and being rich in features. The question
is: why does AGR have to be present?
We could assume that AGR is not present in all languages: Japanese and Chinese would
possibly be languages lacking AGR (see Fukui & Speas (1986)). These languages challenge
Taraldsen's original idea that null subjects are dependent on rich AGR-morphology. There are,
on the other hand, languages having no overt AGR-morphology and nevertheless being closely
similar to the Indo-European languages we have considered, namely Scandinavian languages. If
the idea that Chinese/Japanese lack AGR is to to account for their exceptional behaviour, then
we should ask why Scandinavian languages do not take the negative setting for the [±AGR]
parameter. This parameter should have some trigger for one or the other value.
We could then argue that the trigger for the positive value is the presence of phi-features
in the language. As argued by Fukui & Speas (1986), Japanese (and Chinese) seem to lack phi-
features altogether.
This approach is, however, problematic in one sense: Japanese, which has overt Case
morphology and is a Nominative-Accusative language, seems to abide by Burzio's generalization
as far as its Case array is concerned. Since our account for BG is based on AGR, we cannot
adopt the view that Japanese (and probably Chinese) lacks AGR.
We will suggest another possibility. All languages have AGR. 90 Not all languages have
phi-features. Then we could reformulate our rule 0 as:
89 The latter idea could be challenged: we could claim that
the Case filter (or visibility requirements) are an
epiphenomenon, due to the fact that AGR (and other FCs) have to
discharge Case (thanks to Jeff Runner for this suggestion). I
will not pursue the issue.
90 In Chapter 4 we will propose that some infinitival
constructions do not have AGR: if so, the correct claim would be
that all languages have AGR in finite sentences.
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