A last Resort Approach to (Number) Feature Inheritance1

Abstract

In this paper, we assume Chomsky's (2005, 2007, 2008) feature inheritance framework as an attempt to explain the correlation between the presence of C and agreement/finiteness on T in English. We argue, however, against one of its critical assumptions, namely, that T is a head deprived of φ-features (i.e., a mere feature receptacle as put by Richards 2007). The proposal of this paper is threefold. First, based on the possibility of ellipsis in different infinitival contexts, we argue that there are two types of T heads in English: the one used in ECM contexts, containing no φ-features, and the other occurring in finite/control/raising clauses and for-infinitives, which contains (at least) a person feature. Second, even though finite clauses, for-infinitives, and control clauses are all headed by C, only the T head in finite clauses displays full agreement. We show that maintaining the feature inheritance hypothesis in the face of this challenge leads us to further distinguish two types of C heads in English: only the C head in for-infinitives is φ-complete, whereas that in finite/control clauses hosts only an inherent number feature. Finally, after reviewing the problems with existing motivations for Chomsky's feature inheritance hypothesis, we advance a novel approach to feature inheritance in which only the number feature is inherited as a last resort strategy to form a φ-complete head for Case valuation in a phase. * This paper is financially supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan (MOST 106-2628-H-009-003-MY2). We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and questions. The first author would like to express gratitude to Prof. Chen-Sheng Liu for his support and encouragement. Both authors would like to thank Sam Epstein, Daniel Seely, and Acrisio Pires for their guidance during their graduate study at Michigan. All remaining errors are our own.

On the properties of phase heads in raising and passive clauses: DP movement and Transfer options

“…In this short article I argue that C is also present in the derivation of raising clauses but is removed from the workspace after DP movement yields intersecting sets, in the sense of Epstein et al (2012Epstein et al ( , 2015 (henceforth EKS). In section 2, I explore the implications of Chou and Fernández-Salgueiro's (2020) (henceforth C&F-S) claim that person features are not inherited from C, for EKS's theory of Transfer, and in section 3, I argue that Transfer may also apply to the phase heads C and v, yielding the type of syntactic structure associated with raising and passive clauses. In section 4, I discuss ECM and unaccusative clauses.…”