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

Another issue to consider is Chomsky's Object-AGR. As we said, the existence of
universal Object-AGR is in principle a welcome possibility for a theory claiming that Accusative
is always available in principle. However, Chomsky's proposal raises several problems. One is
that it is considerably theory internal and empirically under-determined: for many languages
there is little evidence that object agreement exists. If objects receive Accusative by moving to
Spec of Object-AGR, then we could possibly expect some head initial languages to have the
order Object-Verb (i.e., languages having overt object movement and covert V-movement). This
unattested possibility can be excluded somehow, but then the hypothesis has little predictive
power for comparative syntax.
Perhaps part of Chomsky's theory could be kept without conflicting with RM. In fact, as
far as I know, Chomsky's recent proposals have been built as an alternative to RM, and it is not
surprising that the two theories conflict. However, sometimes it happens that alternative research
strategies are not pointing at the same theoretical domain and are not, therefore, theoretically
incompatible. It could turn out, for instance, that Chomsky's Spec of Object-AGR position is not
an A-position as far as RM is concerned. For instance, we could try to define, in the spirit of
Rizzi (1991-b), (non-θ) A-positions as Specifiers of FC showing overt agreement. 105 Object-
AGR would never be involve overt agreement in many languages.
Another possibility we could contemplate is that Object-AGR assigns Accusative by
government, and that then its Specifier is not (necessarily) projected, so that no problem for RM
arises. I leave the issue here.
105 In that sense, English null C o , which is a manifestation
of agreement in Rizzi's theory, would be 'overt' agreement in
the sense that its obligatory null form in the relevant cases is
in 'overt' contrast with the optionally overt form (that).
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