Discourse-Agreement Features, Phasal C and the Edge: a Minimalist Approach

Abstract

In this paper I deal with the syntactic process of AGREE in the Minimalist Pro¬gram, the role of discourse/agreement features in it and their combination with an EF (edge feature) to trigger attraction. Miyagawa (2005) has classified lan¬guages as focus or agreement prominent, depending on the type of grammatical features (discourse or agreement) they allow to inherit from C(omplementiser) to T(ense). Some languages highlight discourse functions (Korean or Japanese), other languages put a special emphasis on agreement marking (English), but I claim that there is a third type of language which gives precedence to both dis¬course features and agreement features (Spanish). Following Chomsky's Uniformity Principle, all languages contain discourse features and agreement features. By feature inheritance, these inflectional features percolate down from a phasal head to the immediately lower head, thus accounting for the feature selection of Lan¬guages, their flexible/rigid word order, and the different position that is targeted by discourse-driven moved constituents across languages. In languages of the Spanish group the landing site of displaced topics is shown to be the specifier of the Tense Phrase. Evidence in favour of this analysis comes from Binding facts.