Eliminating parameters from the narrow syntax

A parameter-free underspecification approach to complementizer agreement

“…This limitation does extend to the underspecification approach developed here for complementizer realization, since it does not encode parameters as primitives, but only the variable ordering of operations in narrow syntax, which is enough to generate the range of legitimate/grammatical structures we considered. Alternative rule orderings might be fixed through language acquisition (though see and EPSTEIN, 2016;EPSTEIN et al, 2018 on 'intra'-variation). Concerning the generalized optionality of an overt complementizer in wh-questions in BP, it might be the case that it maintains multiple orderings (or underspecification) of rule application due to dialectal variation.…”

The role of SE in Spanish agreement variation

“…To support this claim it is shown that neither definiteness nor Case assignment are responsible for the lack of agreement pattern. The proposal combines two basic ingredients: the special featural configuration of SE (Mendikoetxea 1999, D'Alessandro 2008 and the parametrization of the order of syntactic operations (Obata et al 2015, Obata & Epstein 2016. This analysis reflects the asymmetries with respect to Italian and Icelandic data and is compatible with a similar case of variation in Spanish dat-nom psych-verb structures.…”

“…The gist of my proposal for non-agreeing SE is that the clitic creates an intervention effect that blocks agreement with the IA. The optional alternation with the agreeing version follows from applying a relative timing of AGREE and MOVE (Obata et al 2015, Obata & Epstein 2016. This analysis becomes more transparent when comparing SE contexts with the variation found in dat-nom configurations in Spanish, to which I devote the last part of the section.…”

“…The novelty is that Spanish SE has not been treated as a intervener before, neither as a case of intra-speaker optionality. In particular, I follow the idea that this optionality is part of syntax (Biberauer & Richards 2006) and adopt Obata et al's (2015) and Obata & Epstein's (2016) proposal that different grammatical outputs are explained by the timing of syntactic operations. 4 I keep the intuition that the specific featural configuration of SE has an impact on agreement, mainly blocking the possibility of person agreement with the IA.…”

Form Copy and Markovian Gaps in Latin Syntax: The Control Case

“…A sophisticated architecture postulated for the UG in the Government and Binding period, with its modular architecture and module-specific principles, and a rich set of parameters, has proven untenable in view of the evolutionary considerations. The simplification of the UG, the gradual reduction of the number of operations postulated for the generative mechanism (including the unification of External and Internal Merge) and the elimination of parameters as envisaged in the earlier period, making them emergent properties of the externalization procedure (see Roberts (2019); Obata and Epstein (2016), Epstein, Obata, and Seely (2017) explore the idea of variation in meeting conditions on computation as a possible source of variation in the syntactic derivation) are all conceptually grounded in the need to answer the evolvability problem. With this shift of focus, third factor principles and conditions has gained more prominence.…”