A Note on the Defective T and Merge of There

A Note on the Defective T and Merge of There

In Chomsky's (1995, 2000) minimalist theory, θ-theory and movement theory are assumed to have complementary nature. This means that the operation Merge of Chomsky (2000) may not induce agreement, or feature checking in the sense of Chomsky (1995); agreement is induced only by the operation Agree. In English, however, there seem to be some cases where checking domains (Chomsky 1995) may be established by "pure" (external) Merge In these cases, such non-arguments as whether, if, and there remain in their "base" positions, in which they are externally merged, but feature checking, i e, uninterpretable feature deletion, occurs anyway. In this short note, we suggest that in this situation, agreement, i e, feature deletion, may be induced by external Merge, In particular, external Merge of the expletive there in the Spec of T, whether T is full or defective, may induce agreement and hence lead directly to the checking of the nonsemantic selectional feature [uper]^<rpp> of T.