Multiple Agree and the Defective Intervention Constraint in Japanese *

Chomsky (2000, 2001) proposes a theory of AGREE which eliminates ‘featuremovement’ entirely in feature-checking, elaborating ATTRACT of Chomsky (1995). Whereas the theory of AGREE brings a number of conceptual advantages over ATTRACT, it also poses a new challenge. Specifically the proposed mechanism of AGREE cannot deal with covert multiple featurechecking (i.e. multiple AGREE without MOVE) under the proposals of the Defective Intervention Constraint (DIC) and elimination of equidistance in multiple specifiers (Chomsky 2000, 2001; cf. Chomsky 1995). This paper, building on the data from varieties of raising in Japanese, presents empirical evidence for multiple covert feature-checking and elimination of the Equidistance Principle, and proposes a theory of MULTIPLE AGREE as a sophistication of the mechanism of multiple feature-checking. It is argued that ‘multiple feature checking’ as multiple applications of a feature-checking syntactic operation is epiphenomenal and that rather it is a single instance of a simultaneous syntactic operation MULTIPLE AGREE. It is further demonstrated that the proposed theory of MULTIPLE AGREE leads to a natural and significant refinement of Chomsky’s (2000) theory of the DIC as a strictly derivational locality condition on a syntactic operation AGREE, eliminating the notion of equidistance in Chomsky (1995).