SEPARATING "FOCUS MOVEMENT" FROM FOCUS (December 2005)

Movement operations in the Minimalist Program (MP) framework are assumed to be last resort, that is, to have to be driven by some interface need. In recent versions of the MP (Chomsky 2000, 2004), movement has been viewed as a concomitant of the operation 'Agree', under which a head bearing an uninterpretable (unvalued) instance of a formal feature F, acting as Probe, seeks to enter into a feature-matching relation with another category (the Goal) in its c-command domain that is endowed with the feature F. When the head (the Probe) furthermore has the EPP property, i.e., a need to merge a Spec in addition to its complement, then the Goal specifically, the constituent containing the matching feature may undergo movement, namely internal Merge with the Probe. A further assumption for the implementation of movement made in Chomsky (2000, 2004) is that categories are active, i.e., visible, for Agree, only if they have some uninterpretable feature. The matching feature found in the search domain of the Probe determines a constituent in accord with the principles of "Pied-piping", and it is this pied-piped constituent that gets merged as the Spec of the Probe satisfying its EPP feature. Thus the 'Move' operation of earlier frameworks is taken to be a composite operation of 'Agree, Pied-Pipe, Merge'.

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