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

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Pesetsky and Torrego forthc, Wiltschko 2003, Brandt 2003). They must be gratuitously
extended to contentless nominals that yet require Case, like idiom chunks
and expletives, and so be viewed as a pure legibility requirement of LF (see chapter
6). Other proposals for Case seem to lead to the same conclusions, including
Case for pied-piping (Chomsky 2000a: 127), and tokenization (Uriagereka 1996).
We may distinguish such pure legibility requirements on the input to the external
systems, irremediable within them, from requirements that may be met either
within syntax or the external systems, because the features and configurations involved
are legible to them. Case is of the former kind. One way to implement it is
through PF/LF-illegible features on lexical items. 171
The licensing of [+person] elements will be seen in chapter 6 to have the
same profile, but here the interest is its relationship to Case licensing. [+person]
licensing has been partly or wholly subsumed under Case licensing in Baker
(1996: 5.3), Anagnostopoulou (2003), Rezac (2003), Béjar and Rezac (2009), and
the literature cited there. The profile of its repairs strongly hints at it as well, for
they clearly fix [+person] restrictions by an extra Case. Moreover, movement to an
independently available higher Case domain might also have the same effect, discussed
by Baker (forthc). A key problematique is the differential licensing of
1 st /2 nd and 3 rd persons (cf. Ormazabal 2000). In the PCC context, a dative intervenes
for the agreement and licensing of [+person] but not other DPs. The cited
works make proposals that allow a uniform approach to the Case licensing of all
DPs, such as the separation of person and number and the absence of person on 3 rd
person DPs. One view has been adopted here in sections 5.2 and 5.4.
Other construals of [+person] licensing would work for ℜ, provided they are
failures of Full Interpretation (legibility) at PF/LF, and repairable by the activation
of an Agree/Case system. The PF possibility in (352) is inspired by the (distinct)
proposals of Ormazabal and Romero (2002), Nevins (2007), Anagnostopoulou
(2008), and Sigurðsson and Holmberg (2008): 172
(352) A phi-probe Agrees with both the applicative and lower [+person] argument
in a PCC context, and the resulting combination of person values on
a single terminal fails Full Interpretation.
ℜ does not see PF-internal problems like arbitrary gaps. However, if (349)
were a legibility problem at the input to PF, ℜ could respond to it in the same way
171 We may compare the extension of the Stray Affix Filter from the morphological need of affixes
to attach to stems to all overt and covert head movement in Chomsky (1995).
172 The view of (352) as a (PF) legibility problem relates to Ormazabal and Romero (2002) proposal
that feature mismatch cancels the derivation (cf. Chomsky 1995: 233-5, 262f., 281, 308f.).
Sigurðsson and Holmberg's (2008) analysis suggests rather that (352) is a PF-internal problem
remediable by syncretisms, albeit not fully (Sigurðsson 1996: ex. 68-70) (cf. Boeckx 2000,
Schütze 2003). However, empirically PCC repairs do not occur for PF-interal problems like
agreement or clitic gaps (sections 5.2, 5.6). Other PF proposals are Albizu's (1997a) constraint on
person prominence, and Bonami and Boyé's (2006: 304f.) condition on paradigm formation.