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On certain violations of the Superiority Condition, AgrO, and economy of derivation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 1997

ŽELJKO BOšKOVIĆ
Affiliation:
Author's address: Department of Linguistics, U-145, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269, U.S.A. E-mail: [email protected] University of Connecticut

Abstract

This paper examines Superiority effects with VP internal constituents in English, Spanish and Bulgarian. It is argued in the paper that certain data concerning Superiority effects provide evidence for the existence of AgrO. In particular, they provide evidence that Accusative wh-phrases undergoing syntactic wh-movement must move to SpecAgrOP on their way to SpecCP. The data examined in the paper are also shown to provide support for the Economy account of the Superiority Condition.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
1997 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

For helpful comments and suggestions on previous versions of this paper, I thank Loren Billings, Lisa Cheng, Marcel den Dikken, Steven Franks, Masatoshi Koizumi, anonymous JL referees, and especially Howard Lasnik and Mamoru Saito. Thanks are also due to a number of other people, especially Tzvetelina Ganeva, Lily Grozeva, Roumyana Izvorski, Guillermo Lorenzo, Roumyana Slabakova, Ioana Stefanescu, and María Uribe-Echevarria, for help with judgments. This work was supported in part by NSF grant SBR-951088. Some parts of this paper were presented at the Syntax Workshop at the University of Connecticut in 1992 and the Second Annual Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL) held at MIT in 1993. The paper is a revised version of some parts of my 1992 paper ‘ECP, superiority, and multiple wh-movement in overt syntax’. The rest of that paper appeared in the Proceedings of FASL 2.