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

176
Structure: a syntactic structure with a clitic blocks one with a strong pronoun because
it distributes the same features across fewer lexicalized terminals.
Minimize Structure as well is highly constrained. It can only choose between
structures that differ in the amount of functional content above a shared lexical
item. For the PCC in French, it works very well. A cliticization failure is viewed
as the failure to meet a clitic's syntactic requirement to attach to a host in the
clause. When the PCC prevents cliticization, this need is not met, the structure
with a clitic crashes, and so a strong pronoun is licensed. Yet Minimize Structure
predicts the same for all the other syntactic and interpretive cliticization failures in
French, in none of which do dative and accusative strong pronouns become available:
in adjectival modifiers, causatives, coordinate structures, and so on (section
6.6). Kayne (2000: chapter 9) reaches this conclusion more generally about French
pronouns. Minimize Structure is too general.
What is needed is a global mechanism like Minimize Structure, yet restricted
so as to respond to the PCC but not to these other problems. At the same time, it
must be supple enough to encompass the various forms of the repair, from adding
an ergative to strengthening a PP, each hopefully emerging the from independent
principles and parameters of a language. The guiding intuition here is (268):
(268) The PCC repairs are the minimal addition of an Agree/Case capacity to a
structure in response to the PCC as a failure of an Agree/Case licensing.
Within the framework assumed here, the Agree/Case mechanism is driven by
uninterpretable features, so (268) falls under the addition of an uninterpretable feature
in response to a problem, ℜ in (38). ℜ finds itself narrowly circumscribed by
the architecture of the system in which it is set: strong modularity and phase-based
cyclicity. The next section develops these proposals.
(38) ℜ: An uninterpretable feature may enter the numeration only if needed for
Full Interpretation of the syntactic structure built from it.
5.4 The Minimalist Program: uninterpretability, interfaces,
and repairs
5.4.1 Uninterpretable features: phi, Case, and Agree
The Minimalist Program MP investigates the character of syntax in light of the
systems with which it interfaces. The language faculty consists of systems specifying
well-formed objects and of mappings between them. Among them are syntax,
and the external systems of realization and interpretation, PF and LF, perhaps unitary,
perhaps cover-terms for diverse systems such as phonology and morphology
at PF, thematic and quantificational structure at LF. The PF and LF modules are