Agree to Move?

Abstract

In Chomsky (1998), Move is defined as a composite operation consisting of three components: Agree, Identify and Merge. I will argue that the definition of Move as a composite syntactic operation cannot be maintained. In particular, I will claim that, as there is no composite transformation such as Passivization, there is no composite operation like Move as defined in Chomsky (1998). I will also argue that his definition of Move may give rise to a serious "look-ahead" problem. Furthermore, I will show that his Activization hypothesis that only the expression with an uninterpretable feature is accessible to syntactic operations leads us to make an ad hoc assumption that the expletive there merged to SPEC-T is an X° head. The present paper will present reasons why the operation Agree allows a probe to skip the expletive there in searching for its goal, whereas Move must raise the expletive located closer to the probe. On the basis of these observations, I will claim that Agree and Move should be regarded as separate syntactic operations; the task of Agree is to erase uninterpretable features of both probe and goal, and that of Move is to satisfy the EPP-feature. I will also claim that we do not need to keep the thesis that simpler operations (Merge, Agree or their combination) are chosen over Move, even though Move is analyzed as a more complex operation.