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

(97) a. AGR must have an AGR-identifier.
b. X can be an AGR-identifier iff X is rich in the phi-features which are present in the
language.
c. AGR o /Spec of AGR is the AGR-identifier of AGR.
Since Japanese (and Chinese) have a null set of phi-features, condition 0.b) can be
fulfilled in a trivial way. AGR o is vacuously rich in Japanese, and it can licence pro as an I-
subject.
Summing up, the rules we postulated for AGR can be conceived as belonging to a set
universal licensing principles:
a) AGR must be licenced by having an I-subject (as expressed by 0) and providing this I-
subject by Case as expressed by 0 and 0);
b) since AGR consists in features, it must also be licenced by being able to display a
sufficiently rich set of features (as expressed by 0). This will allow the I-subject to be an empty
element whose content is recoverable from by the AGR-identifier ( in a trivial way if the
language has no phi-features).
All these proposals are highly speculative, and there is a good deal of vagueness in them.
The main difference with other instances of licensing principles is the strictly formal nature of
the licensing principles for AGR. A licensing principle for, say, Operator-variable structures is
more deeply rooted in interpretation and, therefore its existence seems to be a matter of necessity
if language has to be an instrument for carrying meaning. If, however, the above proposal proves
to be on the right track, it constitutes an argument for the autonomy of syntax, whose formal
principles would be independent from the constraints on well-formed semantic structures.
2.6. Inverted Copulative Constructions
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