Feature-relativized Criterial Freezing

This paper investigates the motivation for criterial freezing: the ban on movement from a criterial position. Rizzi (2006) argues that criterial freezing is motivated by the duality of semantics and the economy condition on chain formation: a chain may only have one theta-role and one discourse property. On the other hand, Rizzi (2015) attributes criterial freezing to the labeling algorithm and the maximality principle. This paper’s objective is twofold. First, I demonstrate that the labeling algorithm-based criterial freezing is only applicable to overt movement given the standard assumption that the labeling algorithm is only applicable to an element with phonological features. Second, I extend the semantic-based criterial freezing of Rizzi (2006) and argue that criterial freezing is sensitive to exhaustive satisfaction of criterial features; this feature-based criterial freezing accounts for the fact that an element with multiple criterial features may covertly move from one criterial position to another.