The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

The loss of object–verb word order 153The verb bought adjoins to AgrO and gets its V-features checked there againstthe V-features of AgrO. The object the book also moves into AgrOP for checkingpurposes – in (43), it is shown as being in the specifier position; anotherpossibility would be for it to adjoin to AgrOP, as shown in (44) (in technicalterms, the adjoined position is also part of AgrO’s checking domain; seeChomsky 1993: 12). In either case, the object will check its N-features againstthose of AgrO.(44)AgrOPthe bookiAgrOPAgrO'AgrOVPbought j AgrO V'VNPt jt iWe should also note that the two applications of movement in (43) and (44)are linked, in that (for technical reasons that we will not go into here) movementof V to AgrO is seen as a precondition for movement of the object to thespecifier position of AgrOP.Although we have used an English sentence as an example, it is assumed inChomsky (1993) and much later work that any sentence with a NP object inany language will have a derivation of this type: the object starts out postverballyin VP, but at the semantic interface level LF it must have moved intoAgrOP for checking purposes. Where languages differ is in the point of thederivation at which the rules of the phonological component operate. In somelanguages, they do so at a point before object movement into AgrOP, i.e. at astage when the order of object and verb is still as in the initial structure (42);this possibility is instantiated by present-day English, which has surface VOorder. In surface OV languages, however, the phonological rules yielding theactual pronunciation take as their input a structure in which the object hasalready moved into AgrOP, i.e. a structure as in (43) or (44). Using the technicalterm Spell-Out for the point at which the phonological rules operate, wecan represent the two possibilities as in (45).