The Spec-Head Relation: its Reign and Fall

The Spec-Head relation has been one of the most important syntactic relations in generative grammar. The present paper will review the consequences of adopting the Spec-Head relation as a kind of government relation in the GB-theory, and the expanding role of the relation in the early Minimalist Program, and will investigate some of the (unnecessary) assumptions and principles that have to be postulated by employing the relation in linguistic analysis. Then, I will discuss the consequences of the claim that the Spec-Head relation cannot be a structural configuration that is allowed by the Interface Conditions (ICs). I will also point out that the ICs requires we reconsider/reanalyze Ura s (1996, 2000) multiple feature checking analysis and Yang s (2000) multiple Agree analysis of the so-called multiple Spec constructions in languages like Korean and Japanese. I will propose a new parameter for the constructions for further research.