Agreement with (the internal structure of) copies of movement

This chapter discusses agreement between complementizers and coordinated subjects in Dutch dialects. In the relevant dialects, the complementizer must display agreement with the fi rst conjunct if the coordinated subject remains in [Spec,TP]. However, if the subject is extracted, this agreement morphology on the complementizer leads to an ungrammatical result. Based on this asymmetry between heads of chains and lower copies, the chapter proposes that internal structures of copies left by movement operations are not accessible to the operation Agree. More specifi cally, it is proposed that copies left by movement are reduced in the sense that they only consist of the Φ-feature set of the maximal projection of the moved item. This view of copies therefore provides an alternative account for why the lower copies in constructions with more than one copy phonetically realized must be “reduced” (Nunes 2004).

Published online: 27 June 2007
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.107.14kop