Facets of derivational computation in syntax: How merge and agree work to construct derivations

The Minimalist Program is one approach to the study of language that takes the object of inquiry, the human "faculty of language" (FL), to be an internal property of humans. This research program builds on the Principles and Parameters Program and adopts Galilean intuition in the study of language, considering FL to be perfectly designed in that it is made up of interface conditions and general properties of organic systems. The goal of this dissertation, which studies FL in the "Minimalist Inquiries" framework of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 2000b and much subsequent work), is to develop this research program by pushing forward its basic conceptual ideas toward the logical conclusions that it deduces.;This dissertation has five parts and includes seven chapters. In part I of this dissertation, which is Chapter 1, we discuss in some detail conceptual and theoretical backgrounds for the Minimalist Program in the study of language in the context of scientific inquiries, spelling out the language design envisioned in this theoretical framework and introduce important concepts and ideas behind the Minimalism to set the stage for our theoretical discussion. In Part II, we argue that perspectives from Japanese scrambling shed light on the nature of CHL. In Chapter 2, we investigate the operation Move (Agree + Copy + Merge) and make three theoretical proposals concerning its nature based on the EPP analysis of scrambling and in Chapter 3, we propose a derivational explanation of A/A'-distinction (properties), arguing that ϕ-feature Agreement is the mechanism to satisfy the C-I interface condition concerning A/A'-distinction. In Part III, our focus is on computational efficiency and the theory of derivation. We study the mechanisms of derivation in C HL and explore the notion of computational efficiency in derivational computation. In Chapter 4, we discuss the notion of phase and propose that a phase is computationally understood in terms of feature convergence of a computation-driving head, spelling out a view that it falls out from the internal workings of CHL (derivational computation) as its consequence. We show that our proposal has a number of theoretically and empirically far-reaching consequences. We also suggest a new idea on operative complexity in language computation and propose to eliminate lexical (sub-)array (numeration). In Chapter 5, we propose that the locality of movement falls out as a natural consequence of the derivational computation that we propose in Chapter 4, giving a principled explanation to island/Subjacency effects in terms of derivation. We show that the proposals in this chapter, coupled with other independently motivated considerations, can explain various extraction islands and their parametric differences in a principled way. In Part IV, which is Chapter 6, we explore the nature of computational operations, Merge and Match/Agree by discussing the problem of the EPP (or EPP effects) and the nature of structure building (derivation construction). We argue that Merge is driven by [M]erge-feature, the Merge drive in CHL, which must be part of design conditions as a virtual conceptual necessity and propose a unified theory of structure building in terms of M-feature and the general condition on Merge. The EPP effects follow as one consequence of M-feature satisfaction in CHL if a (functional) head bears at least more than one M-feature. Since the feature generates linguistic expressions by driving Merge, it is an optimal solution to the interface conditions (viz. deep and surface semantics) imposed by the C-I interface. We also propose as a consequence of our discussion in this chapter that Match/Agree is a natural consequence of Merge. Besides, we argue that uninterpretable features relate to computational efficiency. The summary and the conclusion of this dissertation are given in Chapter 7 (Part V), where we also discuss future directions and future prospects of the Minimalist Program. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...