Finiteness Asymmetries between Agreement and Agreementless Languages

This paper presents an analysis of asymmetries of long-distance A-dependencies between languages with agreement like English an d languages without agreement like Korean. The observational fact is that A-dependencies occur long-distance, crossing over a finite clause in languages like Korean. This fact poses a problem for the conventional assumption that A-dependencies are clause-bounded. The issue is how to resolve the discrepancy in locality in the theory of grammar. I show that the apparent long-distance A-dependencies are made up of a set of successive cyclic local movement. My generalization is that A-dependencies take place long-distance regardless of finiteness of the clause in languages like Korean. This generalization is accounted for under the hypothesis that the subject is raised to Spec TP in agreement languages, while it is not in agreementless languages. The evidence is given by Korean. It is argued that in Korean, the thematic subject is not raised to Spec TP, and consequently Spec TP is available as an escape hatch for A-movement (Kim 2011). The difference in agreement results in the difference in the subject positions, which consequently bring about the difference in locality. The guiding idea of my analysis is that even though syntactic dependencies, whether A or A', are unbounded, the core structural relations are fundamentally local. My analysis applies generally to all the typical A-dependency constructions; raising, passive, control, and anaphor binding. My analysis is subsumed under the Relativized Minimality (Rizzi 1990).