Checking Economy

This article argues for a restrictive asymmetric checking theory according to which only formal features of functional heads need to be checked for convergence. This theory enables us to dispense with several economy conditions assumed within Chomsky's (1995) checking theory: the Equidistance Condition, Last Resort (Greed), the multiple-Spec hypothesis, and the assumed null cost of Merge as a feature-checking operation. Empirical data supporting these arguments come mainly from Kirundi (Bantu) subject-object reversal and transitive expletive constructions.