Comparative Syntax of the Balkan Languages (Oxford ... - Cryptm.org

208 MARIA LUISA RIVEROthat the order resulting from this Blg stylistic fronting sounds literary or archaicto many speakers—and is often reported as ungrammatical—while ordersresulting from the three movements I call stylistic above are completelyunmarked and always reported as grammatical. This suggests that stylisticfronting may have been productive in earlier stages of Blg but is now a remnantwith unclear formal properties. As far as I can see, the other rules above are productiveand do not experience changes. Finally, languages with LHM may lackstylistic fronting altogether, as in Breton; this suggests that the two processesshould be kept apart, even if they bear a resemblance and can be viewed as PFdriven at a deeper level of abstraction.With the three stylistic verb movement rules in Blg now in place, I willmotivate the idea that they satisfy a PF configurational requirement of the functionalcategory that triggers them but escape the Last Resort Principle in (1)because they do not involve formal feature matching and so do not establish asuccessful checking relation. We saw above that in some cases stylistic rules donot establish a checking domain for the attractor, as in (5). By contrast, in othercases they establish such a domain, as in (3) and (7), which last represents achallenge to the idea that stylistic rules are not in general involved in formalfeature checking; thus, I will now show that it too escapes Last Resort, since noformal feature matching obtains.My proposal is that the Blg particle li, which is a functional category witha phonological matrix and occupies C (Rivero 1993), requires in PF a constituentwith a phonological matrix (i.e., an overt item) in its checking domain,which can be an overt phrase in Spec-CP or an overt head adjoined to li, irrespectiveof the formal features this overt item may contain. Another way toexpress this requirement is that li imposes a PF condition that mentions achecking configuration, which is a phonological-like counterpart of the formalfeature-checking condition of the computational system that mentions a checkingconfiguration and in addition a matching clause condition, or the Last ResortPrinciple. When the PF requirement of li is not met in the computationalsystem, it constitutes the trigger for the subsequent stylistic verb movement inPF. In this view, when computational processes place constituents in thechecking domain of li, or when verb movements in PF also place the verb inthat environment, the procedures are not triggered by the need to check the formalfeatures of those constituents against those of li.In LHM constructions such as Cel li e knigata and Pitam [cel li e knigata]in (3), li occupies C and attracts the nonfinite verb in main or embedded clausesin order to satisfy its PF condition. The sentences CeteS li ja? and Pitam[ceteS li ja] in (7) exemplify that finite verbs are attracted to li in similarsyntactic environments. Even though the verb is in the checking domain of li inall these cases, it is my view that the two heads do not share what Chomsky(1995) calls [-interpretable] features, so that the relation that is established doesnot count as the successful checking relation required by the Last ResortPrinciple in (1). In other words, these varieties of LHM and finite verb movementfulfill the checking domain condition of Last Resort, or its configurationalpart but not its matching clause, or its content part. Here, then, we have