In this article, we argue that, under current conceptions of the architecture of the grammar, apparent wh -dependencies can, in principle, arise from either a movement or a base-generation strategy, where Agree establishes the syntactic connection in the latter case. The crucial diagnostics are not locality effects, but identity effects. We implement the base-generation analysis using a small set of semantically interpretable features, together with a simple universal syntax-semantics correspondence. We show that parametric variation arises because of the different ways the features are bundled on functional heads. We further argue that it is the bundling of two features on a single lexical item, together with the correspondence that requires them to be interpreted apart, that is responsible for the displacement property of human languages.

In this article, we argue that a structural distinction between predicational and equative copular clauses is illusory. All semantic predicational relationships are constructed asymmetrically via a syntactic predicational head; differences reduce to whether this head bears an event variable or not. This allows us to maintain a restrictive view of the syntax-semantics interface in the face of apparently recalcitrant data from Scottish Gaelic.