The EPP in Spanish

One of the unsolved questions in current syntactic theory is why argument DPs that start out within the lexical layer of the clause (i.e., within vP or VP) must sometimes move overtly to a SPEC position within the inflectional layer. It is true that a relationship must be established between the DP and an inflectional head, in that the inflectional head must check a case feature on the DP and the DP must sometimes check phi-features on the inflectional head, but we know that this checking can be done even when there is no overt movement. Given the standard minimalist assumption that movement occurs only when necessary, we would then expect that the checking would always be done without overt movement. Since this does not appear to be true, we must say that certain features can only be checked through overt movement to the SPEC position of the head on which the feature appears (or, alternatively, through merger of an expletive in this position). Features that trigger this type of movement or merger are said to have the “EPP property” (Chomsky 1998).’