Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
There is a widespread assumption within the Government–Binding theory as it has developed from the Barriers model (Chomsky 1986) that functional categories, that is, categories which play a role in establishing dependencies between parts of a sentence, as opposed to lexical categories, should be represented as heads projecting X-bar phrases. I shall refer to this as the Full Functional Projection Hypothesis (FFPH), stated informally in (1). (i) Full Functional Projection Hypothesis Any morphophonosyntactic formative which corresponds to a functional category in a given language is syntactically the head of a maximal projection.