Overt morphological agreement is generally obligatory. In the development of the MP,
Chomsky initially linked movement to “Agree,” where “Agree” was also implicated in
the realization of overt agreement. Taking obligatory movement to spec TP, with overt
subject/verb agreement, and obligatory wh- movement as the canonical cases of
movement, Chomsky develops the probe-goal theory of movement around obligatory
Agree. In the move from an “Economy” theory, in which derivations were compared
against each other and thus no operation was obligatory by itself, the MP had every move
in the derivation forced. Tying movement to Agree made sense within this framework.
The connection between movement and overt agreement, as exemplified by subject/verb
agreement and the EPP for subject position, was challenged by data particularly from
Icelandic, data that split the EPP from agreement. Agreement was empirically linked to
nominative case assignment but split from movement to spec TP and from subjecthood.
The evidence that you present in your paper pertaining to the split of agreement and
movement should be presented as background, and not new to your proposals. Most
syntacticians within the general MP universe would now agree that the “Agree” behind
overt agreement is separate from obligatory movement. The open issue is whether
movement is always connected with an Agree relation (a probe-goal relation) where the
probe carries a feature requiring movement.
So, the original MP proposal linked overt agreement with movement and generalized this
link to suppose that all movement was associated with Agree – triggered by a ccommanding head. This type of theory fit comfortably with the notion that “discourse”
interpretation of constituents as topics or foci of various sorts would be governed by
heads at the periphery of phrases that would Agree with the constituents they attract to
these positions.
Your proposal starts from a different set of observations and correlations. You note that
apparently optional movement cross-linguistically involves a particular set of
interpretations. Quantified expressions change their relative scope via movement.
Movement may yield a topic or focus interpretation without any overt head associated
with topic or focus. Although sentence-level and utterance level topic and focus may
differ from the discourse prominence associated with local dislocation of constituents
within a phase, nevertheless, short scrambling resembles optional clause external
movement in the types of meanings associated with the movement – discourse topic and
focus and new scope for quantified elements. If we suppose that topic and focus
interpretations might be linked to merger outside of “functional” semantic positions (e.g.,
positions associated with theta assignment or adverbial/adjectival modification), then a
generalization emerges: Merger, whether internal or external, is generally free, and
associated with the semantic interpretation that one would expect from the position of
Merger (either a “functional” interpretation, a discourse interpretation, or a (new) scope
interpretation).
On this view, obligatory movement is special, and indeed the various examples of
obligatory movement (1) do not seem to actually involve obligatory MOVEMENT, since
External Merge generally satisfies the EPP for known cases (expletives apparently may
EM into subject positions and adverbial wh- phrases arguably EM into spec of C in
languages with obligatory wh- movement) and (2) seem to stem from a variety of causes
that may involve the PF interface, since generally (a) only overt material satisfies the EPP
and (b) Richards and others have argued for a connection to phonological phrasing, for
obligatory wh- movement, for example.
Your observations leads to the view that Merger in general is free, and triggers
interpretation in the merged position. Obligatory Merger is special, tied to particular
heads, and may involve the PF interface. Only obligatory Merger licenses expletives,
since expletives can’t carry the types of interpretation associated with free Merge.
The technical implementation of your proposal is somewhat independent of your insights.
The crucial technical question is how to implement obligatory Merger, i.e., the EPP. You
choose to suppose, with Chomsky, that the propensity to Merge is a property of all
constituents, and that the necessity to Merge is a special version of this property
associated with a subset of heads. This line of thinking leads to the treatment of Merger
as the checking of an EF and the treatment of the EPP as involving a non-deletable EF.
You could have also simply said that Merger is optional (“free”) except that some heads
have a feature that demands Merger (the EPP feature). This would put Merger outside
any theory of feature checking and leaves open the question of whether Merger is related
to (in the sense of being technically a version of) other syntactic operations (like Agree)
that might involve feature checking. Nothing in your work (in terms of empirical data or
in terms of generalizations) depends on whether you treat “marked vs. unmarked” merger
with EFs or via the notion of Merger itself, where Merger is not associated with any
features (any constituent may or may not Merge; a subset of heads require Merger,
perhaps for ph- related reasons).
What to emphasize at the beginning of your paper:
As soon as overt agreement is split from movement, and overt agreement in general is
triggered by a probe-goal relation between a head and something in its c-command
domain, the motivation for treating movement as connected to Agree is lost. If Merge is
the general operation, cutting across EM and IM and since EM cannot be treated as
triggered by a probe-goal Agree relation within the c-command domain of a probe, then
“free Merge” provides a means of unifying EM and IM. Given that EM is associated
with a semantic interpretation (unless it’s demanded by “EPP”), then IM also would be
associated with a semantic interpretation (unless it’s demanded by “EPP”).
Chomsky in his recent works moves halfway to your position, but not all the way.
Chomsky has all the syntactic work of probe-goal relations and Agree connected with
phase heads. To the extent that not every head is a phase head and that, therefore, there
are EMs that are not the result of a probe-goal relation, Agree, or feature checking,
Chomsky still splits some Mergers from others (as one referee points out, others working
in the MP go in another direct and assume that all Mergers, including all EMs, are
triggered by feature-checkin). In addition, he requires feature spreading (inheritence) of
some sort to allow some movements (e.g., to spec of TP) to be not to a phase head.
However, still, the positions of movement to non-phase heads will be limited in
Chomsky’s system.
Against Chomsky, then, you need to make two points. First, his system does not allow
the full generalization of IM and EM, whereas there doesn’t seem to be any motivation to
split these Mergers. In particular, EPP (obligatory Merger) doesn’t seem to care about
whether Merger is IM or EM and for languages that have left periphery topic and focus,
the interpretation of constituents in these positions doesn’t seem to require movement to
these position (see the arguments for base-generation of topics particularly in Chinese
and Japanese).
Second, you have evidence that phase-internal scrambling should be treated as free IM.
If Chomsky allowed any head to inherit the EF of a phase head, the claim that IM is
always computed at the phase boundary could be vacuous. Rather, you show that
scrambling, whether long or short, shows all the characteristic of free Merge, arguing for
Merger without any probe-goal relation.
I think it’s right to follow the suggestions of the first (sympathetic) referee in revising the
paper. S/he is right that you should lay out in the beginning how your proposal is a return
to the “move alpha” type of theory, but with local interpretation and evaluation of
grammaticality.
There’s some confusion in what you write and in the minds of the referees as to whether
you’re proposal is primarily in opposition to Chomsky’s recent work or primarily a
development of this work. I think it’s fair to say that the proposals are a development of
Chomsky’s recent ideas that differs from his ideas in crucial aspects but agrees with
many of the important insights. You want to contrast your proposals with e.g. Rizzi-style
approaches to movement to the left periphery and with various approaches to cyclic
movement that try to get around look-ahead via special mechanisms. Your arguments
with Chomsky are less direct, and this causes the referees some problems. Essentially,
you want to push Chomsky’s notion that Merge is somehow essentially free and that IM
and EM are equivalent. You disagree with Chomsky in how he divides up types of
Merger. I think you need to emphasis that Chomsky already has a system that predicts
free IM at any constituent, not just the phase boundary, since Merger in general needs to
be free.
It would help, then, if at the beginning of your paper, you provide a table of how
Chomsky’s current system divides up Mergers, then a table of how your system divides
them up. The key empirical claim of your paper, then, is the generalizations across
Mergers it predicts.
Both referees make a big thing about inheritance since technically this might allow
Chomsky to generate the cases of free phase-internal IM that you analyze via free IM. I
think you correctly point out in scattered responses to the referees that an inheritance
approach would wrongly classify short scrambling with obligatory movement to spec TP
and wrongly separate phase internal and phase external optional EM. But this needs to be
made more explicit: what’s at stake again is the proper classification of Mergers to
explain their properties, not the technical means to allow/force Merger.