Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Feature Inheritance: Its principles and operation

 

Ji Young Shim - Université de Genève

 

Chomsky (2008) proposes that only phase heads, C and v, can be specified for probing features and EPP, and T inherits its probing features and EPP from C via feature inheritance (FI henceforth). According to Chomsky, FI is a general property of all phase heads and should be at play in the domain of v-V. However, FI from C to T and v to V do not seem to be parallel; T is a functional category and V is a lexical category. Under Chomsky’s own view that only functional categories can have parameterized features (1995), lexical categories such as V are not eligible for inheriting features from a phase head. Moreover, there are remaining questions how FI operates and accounts for parametric variations such as word order in a principled way. 

 

 

 

This study proposes that the complement of v is not VP but AspP and that the functional head Asp is the befiniciary of FI from v, parallel to FI from C to T. In addition, FI is developed into a full-fledged mechanism, regulated by two principles and governed by three operational rules, which is at play both in the C-T and the v-Asp domains. Finally, the FI system developed in this paper is applied to account for the word order of head-final languages such as Japanese and Korean (SOV) in contrast with that of head-initial languages such as English (SVO).