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

the present widespread conception of Functional Categories, as Functional Category to which the
(participial) verb raises.
The present day multiplication of hypotheses about Functional Categories after Pollock
(1989) initial proposal raises a fundamental question about their universality. One possible view
is that all of them are universal, although possibly not morphologically realized in some
languages. According to this view, English would have Object-Agreement, which, as opposed
the French one, would have no morphological manifestation. An alternative, and perhaps more
realistic view, is that only those FCs exist in a language which have some morphological
manifestation. In this view, English would not have object Agreement.
Of course, an intermediate hypothesis is possible: some FCs are universal (whether they
have overt manifestations or not) and others are not (and will be present only in languages where
they can be detected by the morphology). Chomsky's recent hypotheses (See Chomsky (1992))
postulate that Object-Agreement belongs to the universal type of FC, since it is the universal
means of Accusative-assignment. In fact, this hypothesis is not at odds with our theory on
Accusative, as far as we claim that Accusative Case is in principle available independently of
lexical idiosyncrasies.
I think, however, that French Object-Agreement and Chomsky's abstract Object-
Agreement need not be assimilated as a single concept. French object Agreement is only
operative in a restricted class of sentences, namely the ones involving a moved object of some
kind (an object clitic, a Wh-moved object or a A-moved object). To account for this limited
distribution, Kayne assumes that the Specifier of Object Agreement in French is not a Case
position. Since Accusative assignment in French is quite independent of the Object Agreement
restricted paradigm, we are led to the conclusion that, if a universal Object agreement is to be
postulated, it has nothing to do with French overt Object Agreement.
We will ignore for the moment the possibility of non-overt Object Agreement, and
assume that only French has an Object Agreement FC. I come back to the issue below.
Suppose that Specifier of Agreement FCs counts as an A-position, as would be
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