Motivation for Agreement

초록

In this presentation, first, we discuss Minimalist attempts to prove the strong minimalist thesis (SMT) with regard to agreement in natural language (or Agree a narrow syntax operation) (Chomsky 2000 and others), and point out that it has not been fully successful. We pursue a fuller conceptual motivation for agreement by (i) setting up an operation Associate, which has a version of Merge and Agree as its sub-cases, and (ii) taking the second to produce a chain of features to "link" the syntactic objects that share them. This implies that a feature chain can directly mark some "surface" semantic properties. We argue that this implication is proved to hold by systemizing a number of cases from various languages that are discussed in the literature. Finally, we propose a parameter concerning cross-linguistic differences in utilizing formal features including φ- features.