Some AGREEment Matters

While Minimalist syntax since Chomsky (1995) has assumed that MOVE is parasitic on AGREE (or its equivalent), a substantial body of recent crosslinguistic work suggests that A-movement can occur in the absence of a probe-goal AGREE relation (e.g., Collins 1997; Ura 2000; Wurmbrand 2002; Miyagawa 2001; Lavine and Freidin to appear). Building on such research, this paper argues that EPP satisfaction is not only independent of AGREEment, but also that AGREE-less movement is prohibited from reconstructing (the “Purely EPP Eliminates Reconstruction” generalization, or PEPPER):

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