Phi-features and the Modular Architecture of - UMR 7023 - CNRS

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have their own distinctive syntax, as has been seen for French. They are not alternative
interpretations of independently existing structures, for they do not exist
with a similar interpretation, or at all. They are syntactic structures that only
emerge in the context of the Person Case Constraint. In their very existence lies
half of the extraordinary character of the phenomenon.
The other half is the unity and restraint that may be discerned across the diverse
forms of the repair. At first they seem each a separate bricolage by which a system
mends the gap due to the PCC. 112 Yet neither the forms nor their distribution are
haphazard. The unaccusatives all switch the case-agreement coding of an argument
to one that normally appears only in transitives, absolutive to ergative,
nominative to accusative. Their repair looks like the addition of an Agree/Case relation
ordinarily unavailable to a structure but found in another. The same view
can be taken of the strengthening of a defective or agreeing dative PP to a full,
nonagreeing PP in French and Basque, and even of the transformation of the direct
object in Georgian. All enrich the repaired structure to another that is independently
legitimate, say an intransitive to a transitive and not a transitive to a doubleergative
clause, and they do not modify its 'basic' content, say by introducing or
deleting a lexical item. The repairs are unitary and conservative.
This is the perspective on the repairs that will be developed in this chapter. In
its first part are introduced the Person Case Constraint and its Agree/Case analysis,
section 5.2, and the repairs, 5.3. They are argued to reveal a last-resort mechanism
ℜ, which responds to a failure of Agree/Case licensing by activating the potential
Agree/Case capacity of a structure. In the Minimalist Program, licensing
requirements are Full Interpretation requirements, and they are met by syntactic
dependencies established through Agree for an uninterpretable feature. ℜ is (38):
(236) ℜ: An uninterpretable feature may enter the numeration only if needed
for Full Interpretation of the syntactic structure built from it.
As the last-resort enrichment of a structure to meet Full Interpretation, ℜ descends
from the proposals of Chomsky (1995 et seq.) for similar phenomena:
(237) α enters the numeration only if it has an effect on output.
(Chomsky 1995: 234)
(238) Optional operations apply only if they have an effect on outcome: in the
present case, v* may be assigned an EPP feature to permit successivecyclic
A'-movement […]
(Chomsky 2001: 34)
Here, ℜ is viewed as interface algorithm between syntax and external systems.
A strong view of modularity renders these modules inaccessible to ℜ, circumscribing
in three ways its antecedents like (237) and (238). First, ℜ only responds
to the failure of syntax to meet the input requirements of external systems, Full In-
112 Bricolage is B. Oyharçabal's (p.c.) apt term.