earticle

영어

English contraction had been described by adjacency condition and government condition before the Minimalist Program emerged. These syntactic conditions, however, failed to explain the differences between to-contraction and inflected auxiliary contraction and to suggest a unified explanation for both contraction phenomena. This study shows how English contraction can be described uniformly by Head Movement in the Minimalist Theory. Chomsky(1999) assumes that movement is motivated by the deletion of uninterpretable features. When a predicate-internal subject is extracted, it has usually been assumed that the subject element moves to the specifier of TP first, where Case checking is assumed, and then to the position [Spec, CP]. Following Rizzi`s(1990) definition of proper government, Brass(1995) argues that the trace left in the specifier of TP cannot be proper-governed, and violates the ECP condition. He suggests that the predicate-internal subject moves directly to [Spec, CP] without passing through the VP-external position o avoid the ECP problem. To or inflected auxiliary is should be raised to C to be governed by a main verb to satisfy the government condition for contraction. There should be morphosyntactic requirement of to and is to motivate such movement to C. I assume that Case checking should be allowed in the position [Spec, CP] through a specifier-head agreement to legitimate head-movement to C. The difference between to-contraction and auxiliary contraction can be attributed to the difference between inflected clauses and defective clauses. Following Chomsky(1999) and Yang(1996), I suggest that the head movement for contraction should be regarded as a kind of affix movement in the phonological component after spell-out.