earticle

영어

This paper explores the possibility to define phases in a relative sense rather than in an absolute sense as Chomsky (2000, 2001a,b, 2005) suggested. Unlike the hypothesis that an inherent phase is a proposition, we assume, following Dikken’s (2006) notion of Phase Extension, that the other nodes can acquire phasehood in the course of the syntactic derivation as a result of movement of the head of the inherent small-clause phase to the heads of higher nodes in the structure. Hence, since the predication of a sentence structure is realized in vP, only this unit vP can be an inherent phase and the other maximal nodes can be phases only by means of getting a phasehood by inheritance. We suggest that as a result of v raising to T, TP becomes a phase, unlike Chomsky (2000, 2001a,b, 2005) predicts, and it is an inherited phase. And with T subsequently raising on to C, that also makes CP a derived phase at the next step in the derivation. Thus there are two types of phases : absolute inherent phase vP and inherited/derived phase TP or CP. In Chomsky’s phase system, on the other hand, the edge and the complement of a phase are spelled-out at different times. Such a dispersed double application of Spell-Out within the same phase domain is not ideal syntactic operations. To avoid such double applications of Spell-Out, we suggest that objects for Spell-Out should be qualified full phase domains rather than complements of phase heads as the PIC predicted.