Tense and case

The emergence of TP

assigned by the functional head I to an appropriate constituent projected into the syntactic structure of the clause. This is the subject requirement. If there is no argument to receive those discharged features, expletives are necessary to receive them. In the Minimalist Program, tense is also responsible for nominative case on the subject. T has a nominative case assigning (checking) feature and this case feature is uninterpretable. This strong feature is also checked and deleted by a categorial feature of the raised subject DP, because a strong feature of a nonsubstantive or rather functional category such as T or C must be checked by a feature of a lexical category.

I use the term “strong” feature in the sense of Chomsky (1995, 232-234):

Feature strength is one element of language variation: a formal feature may or may not be strong, forcing overt movement that violates procrastinate, ...If F is strong, then F i s a feature of a nonsubstantive category and F is checked by a categorial feature. ...If so, nouns and verbs do not have strong features, and a strong feature always calls for a

certain category in its checking domain. ...Thus, the EPP plausibly

reduces to a strong D-feature of I, and overt w/z-raising to a strong D- feature of C.

Hence, if a language has no TP, there is no landing site for a moved element. This was the case with earlier English.

According to Chomsky (1995, 284), case features are [-interprétable]^ so that they must be checked and deleted for the derivation to converge. If they are not strong, features are covertly raised to T and checked after Spell-Out. But, these features are strong, so the subject DP moves into [Spec, TP] overtly, i.e. before Spell-Out. But, why doesn’t only the feature raise, leaving the rest of the DP

5 For a contrary view, see Cormack (1995) in w hich it is arg u ed th a t case h a s lexical reflexes in hoth lexical an d com positional sem antics.

The emergence of TP

unaffected? Chomsky (1995,262-263) says:

(32) F carries along just enough material for convergence.

That is, the operation involves pied-piping of the subject DP for Phonological Form (PF) convergence.

A second function of T is to check the tense of the verb (Chomsky 1995, 197).

5.4 />0-support and other associated effects

In adult PE, tensed clauses have the status of TPs, maximal projection of a functional head T, which carries tense (and agreement features, if I take the position of a fused IP for PE). It (or They) must actually be discharged or realized onto a verbal stem. If the modal auxiliaries are base-generated under T, these features are realized on the modal in T. If T/I can be underlyingly empty

and a nonmodal auxiliary verb (perfective have, progressive be^) is in the head V

of VP, this nonmodal auxiliary verb moves out of VP into an empty head T position in TP. It can acquire the tense/(agreement) features of TP there. If I can be underlyingly empty and there is no nonmodal auxiliary verb in VP, T features are discharged onto the head of (nonauxiliary) V of VP.

However, if the negative particle not occurs, for instance, this becomes a

barrier preventing the T/I-features from being discharged onto the head V. Therefore, the following sentence is ungrammatical:

® I have not included th e m ain verb be here. A lthough th e m ain verb

be behaves syntactically in th e sam e way, its sta tu s h a s not yet been

clarified in th e H terature. T his concerns also th e issue of th e n a tu re of

th e predication relatio n in a sentence w here be is used. It m ay he

The emergence of TP

(33) *John not wrote it.

In such a case, the dummy auxiliary do is inserted in T in order to provide a

verbal stem for the tense/agreement features to be discharged onto. This is referred to as üfb-support.

Likewise, an interrogative or emphatic sentence which contains no auxiliary

requires the use of the dummy auxiliary do.

The auxiliaries will, shall, can, may or must, the so-called modal auxiliaries,

are assumed to be base-generated under the T/I node in PE, and have formal syntactic properties (the “nice” properties cf. Huddleston 1976, 333^) which

distinguish them from lexical verbs. The modal auxiliaries as well as the

dummy do can undergo inversion in questions. They are directly negated by a

following not, they occur in tags, etc.

There is then no need to stipulate that lexical verbs do not permit inversion as

in (34), and cannot be directly negated by inserted not, as (33) shows:

(34) *Want you to come?

Rather, these facts fall out from the interaction of independently motivated elements of clause structure and T.