A Minimalist Approach to the That-t Effect

This paper proposes to account for the that-t effect in terms of the availability of agreement in C coupled with the phase-based cyclicity. On a brief review of recent Minimalist approaches to the that-t effect, this paper argues for the non-feature-driven movement to the intermediate phase periphery positions proposed by Szczegielniak (1999). In this approach, the that-t effect arises if the most deeply embedded complementizer does not have ψ-features to enter agreement with the subject, since the subject cannot be positioned at the edge of CP phase from which it can undergo successive cyclic movement. The movement of the object does not show the that-t effect as the object moves to the edge of υP phase, from which it can undergo non- feature-driven phase hopping. One of the advantages of this approach is that it can account for the asymmetry in the successive cyclic wh-movement of the subject and object in a natural and simple way, without recourse to any ad hoc hypotheses or unwarranted features.