점검에서 일치로

From Checking to Agree

The elements, which have generally been called as “inflectional affixes” in traditional grammar, are analyzed as formal features in the recent minimalist syntax. The purpose of the present paper is to investigate how these “formal features” are described in generative grammar, and what their contributions are in the development of the generative tradition. In the GB-framework, formal features were treated as kind of inflectional affixes, so that either relevant lexical items had to move to the affixes or the affixes had to move to relevant lexical items. In Chomsky’s (1993, 1995) early minimalist syntax, formal features of a lexical item are “checked” in terms of appropriate structural relations. In Chomsky (1999, 2000), however, a new computational operation called “Agree” is adopted to describe formal features