| This dissertation aims to revisit foundational issues in syntactic theory regarding cyclicity and displacement. I take narrow syntax to operate over domains (phases) more local than in current Minimalism. To do this, I define a notion of phase overlap which involves the sharing of grammatical features across two independent phases. Phase overlap applies to phases involved in the construction of argument structure, e.g., linking subject and object phases, in further building clausal structure, as well as in embedding of complement clauses, and phase overlap also plays a role in A-bar constructions, such as relativization.;To overlap phases, I take the idea that 'generalized binary connectives' build phrase structure (Vergnaud forthcoming), and extend it in such a way that it gives rise to phases that involve parallel nominal and verbal domains, rather than treating the verbal domain as `privileged'. In this dissertation, both the verbal and nominal domains are implicated at the edges of phases, creating phase overlap and a novel notion of cyclicity: to construct two (consecutive) cycles is to share a pair of features across (both) the nominal and verbal domain.;The definition of 'sharing' across phases, or 'phase overlap', is grounded in the scientific hypothesis that long-distance grammatical relationships are a by-product of interface requirements such as linearization, rather than a fundamental aspect of the architecture at narrow syntax. This hypothesis is based in part on the Items and Contexts Architecture (ICA, Vergnaud forthcoming), although the ICA remains incomplete in its formalization of embedding. From this type of sharing, I develop a strong hypothesis that the appearance of displacement (of a noun) is a product of how the formal computational system spells out, rather than a movement operation that takes place at narrow syntax.;From this hypothesis, I then set forth a unified analysis of the D-C-T domain, where noun sharing plays a crucial role in the linking - generalized linking - of two (otherwise independent) phases, including Subject/Object phases to build a transitive clause (chapter 3), two CP phases involving embedded and matrix clauses (chapter 4) and relative and matrix clauses (chapter 5). Along with noun sharing, I maintain the idea of verbal sharing - in a certain way following the standard literature, i.e. that v is visible to both the lower (object) phase and higher (subject phase). This plays a key component in phase overlap. However, I extend this idea to all embedding, and hypothesize that all embedding shares (semantically interpretable) features. This is seen empirically, especially in cases of control. |
