Earliness Principle - Lear

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via the SPEC-Head relation. The A-bar chain containing who ____ receives Case; hence no do-support __
is needed. 16 The Last Resort character of do-support __ ensures that do-support __ applies only here.
(44)a. [ IP Who [ I e] [ VP t i left]]?
b. *[ Who [ did] [ t leave]]?
IP I VP i
Finally, in embedded questions, which are CPs, the subject can Raise to (SPEC,IP), so
that there is no problem with nominative Case assignment in the normal fashion, and do __ is not
needed.
Actually, something more needs to be said, given that we are deriving the “Last Resort”
character of do __ Insertion from the Earliness Principle, rather than from any “Last Resort Principle”
as such. In fact, Earliness as developed so far require INFL Lowering in examples like (44)b,
thereby preventing Do ___ Insertion and incorrrectly allowing no grammatical output. W e must thus
revise the notion of “satisfies” in (9)-(10) so that Lasnik’s Filter is not satisfied until the Subject
which is to be Case-marked by INFL is also legal with respect to all grammatical principles. I will
not spell out this revision here [i.e. in this draft], but it will involve a generalization of the notion of
“chain” presented there such that if INFL is to assign nominative Case to the subject, the two
elements must form a chain. 17
There is thus a plausible account of Question Inversion that does not interfere with our
account of C-Inv, and brings with it certain advantages of its own. 18 The crucial point is that if
matrix Question Inversion is not an instance of I-to-C, then the availability of do __ in questions is not
a problem for do-inertness. __ Recall in turn that our whole discussion of do-inertness __ is an argument
for LP-structure, which in turn is a crucial part of our Earliness hypothesis.
2.2 Argument #2 for the Innertness of do: __ Adverbs
I assume that adverbs are generated as right or left sisters of XP or X’, depending on
the nature of the adverb. Emonds has argued that V-movement can move a verb leftward to INFL
over an adverb, yielding V _________ Adv NP order, as in (45):
(45) Pierre parle i a`
peine t i l’italien.
P ollock
added the important observation that movement over an adverb does not
necessarily diagnose V-to-I, but could diagnose V movement to a position between V and INFL
which he called “AGR”. I shall call this position, not AGR, but µ. _ I will be arguing later that µ is
not an agreement element at all, but is, in fact, contentless (or, perhaps, an empty verb). P ollock’s
evidence for the existence of the µ-position comes from French infinitives. French infinitives do
not allow θ-assigners to move all the way to INFL, but do allow them to move “half-way” to µ over
an adverbial, as seen in (46a-b):
(46)a. [ IP PRO I [ µ parler i ] [ VP a peine [ VP t i l’italien]]]…
b. *[ PRO [ (ne) parler ] [ pas [ t l’italien]]]…
IP I i NegP VP i
Now let us add a new observation: leftward movement over an adverb in English is
possible for almost every verbal element in IP — not merely for the main verb: