Ebook: Case Absorption and WH-Agreement

This book is an extensively revised version of the core part of my 1993 MIT doctoral dissertation, which seeks to provide a Minimalist theory of Case absorption and support it through empirical investigation. The central idea pursued is that impoverishment of phrase structure is responsible for Case absorption and that the right theory of Case checking should derive this property. Although the basic line of research on Case absorption and wh-agreement remains the same, this book incorporates a lot of new results. A principied theory of Case checking and Case absorption has been worked out in Chapter 1. Treatment of participial constructions in Chapter 3 and wh­ agreement in Chapter 4 is far more systematic and comprehensive. Chapter 2 is also streamlined, together with refinements of the analysis of Romanian. The product, I hope, is a more convincing def ense of the strength of the Mi ni mal ist approach. I would like to thank my thesis committee members Ken Haie, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Lasnik, under whose guidance this project started.

---

The study of A-movement is receiving a lot of attention in recent research under the stimulus of the Minimalist Program. This book provides a principled account of case absorption that gives a precise characterization of the similarities between causative and passive for the first time. It further shows that raising and ECM also involve case absorption, demonstrating the central role that case absorption places in the theory of A-movement. Case Absorption and WH- Agreement is also the first systematic attempt to put a tight constraint on WH-agreement, surveying a wide range of phenomena discussed in the literature to show that despite the superficial morpho-syntactic multiplicity of its realization, WH-agreement is highly restricted because it arises through the interaction between case theory and A-bar processes.
This book targets researchers who are interested in the latest developments in the principles-and-parameters approach, as well as those who want to understand central issues in the theory of A-movement.