A-MOVEMENT IN GERMAN AGREE AND ATTRACT.pdfVIP

Harvard University, May 19, 2000 A-MOVEMENT IN GERMAN: AGREE AND ATTRACT Susi Wurmbrand McGill University University of Vienna 1. INTRODUCTION PART 1: empirical evidence for the existence of AGREE (i.e., feature matching without movement/pied piping; cf. Chomsky 1998, 2000) (1) Some unicorns seem to be in the garden a. — seem to be some unicorns in the garden AGREE: feature matching b. some unicorns seem to be in the garden movement for EPP ? English: due to the EPP, it cannot be shown (conclusively) that MOVE is not triggered by the need to satisfy feature matching but simply by the need to satisfy the EPP ? German: EPP is not effective (at least not for TP/vP); i.e., MOVE is not necessary; if we can show that an XP is in a position lower than its case/agreement position at PF and covert movement is excluded from that position (and nothing else forces the XP to be in the lower position at PF and LF) then we have an argument for AGREE scope freezing: AGREE exists PART 2: locality conditions and domain of AGREE (A-movement) ? restructuring contexts: involve A-movement from the infinitive and matching of case/agreement features with a functional head of the higher predicate; movement is forced, AGREE is not possible/sufficient ? correlation between possibility of AGREE and possibility of reconstruction (i.e., in restructuring contexts reconstruction is impossible) PART 3: towards an account ? feature matching can be met via AGREE or ATTRACT ? AGREE is restricted to the thematic domain of the closest lexical verb in German (i.e., the goal of AGREE has to be an argument of the closest lexical V) ? if ATTRACT is forced (i.e., AGREE is impossible), reconstruction is impossible ? AGREE has different domain in English Susi Wurmbrand 2 2. SCOPE FREEZING 2.1 VP fronting—syntactic and semantic restrictions (2) a. [Einen Wagen geschenkt ] “VP” hat man der Maria noch nie [A car-ACC given ] “VP” has one the Mary-DAT never ‘It never happened that somebody gave Mary a car as a