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

y ℜ in the same way as that of PPDAT, despite the distinctive form of tavization,
and the parametric variation in its availability has a promising treatment.
5.9 Conclusion: The scope and limits of ℜ
5.9.1 Aspects of ℜ
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In this chapter, the repairs of the Person Case Constraint in Table 5.1 and dependent
Case have been unified under ℜ (38), instantiated in the Agree/Case system
as (293) (repeated here). This concluding section returns to the general properties
of ℜ, the link between Case and person licensing and Full Interpretation,
and explores ℜ as a mechanism to satisfy other Full Interpretation requirements.
(38) ℜ: An uninterpretable feature may enter the numeration only if needed
for Full Interpretation of the syntactic structure built from it.
(293) ℜ (for Agree/Case): A uninterpretable feature (probe) may enter the
numeration on a potential Agree/Case locus if needed for Case-licensing.
ℜ is an interface algorithm that operates on the numeration in virtue of its nonconvergence
for Full Interpretation. It leads to syntactic structures that do not exist
otherwise, unlike operations at PF and LF, which can only affect realization or interpretation
(see section 2.3 on PF, on LF Fox 2000a, esp. p. 130-133). The limits
of ℜ are set by a strong modular architecture that encapsulates syntax, PF, LF, and
the lexicon beyond modular barriers. ℜ can respond to the illegibility of a syntactic
structure to the interfacing systems of PF and LF by modifying its numeration
interface with the lexicon. It cannot detect problems within or beyond PF and LF,
affect syntactic computation, or access the lexicon to find lexical items or build
new combinations of sound and meaning. A general principle of structure preservation
lets ℜ add but not delete material. These natural limits on ℜ correspond to
the empirical properties of the repairs. They do not respond to PF and LF-internal
problems, they are conservative of the 'basic' interpretable (legible) content of a
numeration or the structure built from it, and they consist in enrichment of the
numeration with uninterpretable features.
In these limitations, ℜ stands in stark contrast to the fully global framework
of Optimality Theory, but also to more narrow principles that let syntax access LF
or PF (section 5.3). It remains a global, 'last-resort' mechanism by which a syntactic
structure is licensed through reference to a poorer version of itself. Behind the
globality lies the intuition that the Agree/Move mechanism should not be enriched
with the power to account for the pathless interactions among arguments that are
needed to unify the repairs, although such a move is theoretically envisageable.
An example is Bittner and Hale's (1996) incorporation of the notion of Casecompetitor
in an A-movement domain for Case assignment, to capture dependent
Case, one of the phenomena that here have been subsumed under ℜ (section 5.5).