A strong argument in favor of the existence of rightward, string-adjacent head movement comes from Han, Lidz, and Musolino (2007). They argue that Korean language-internal variation with respect to the scopal order between negation and universal quantifier objects shows that in the variety where negation takes wide scope, the negative marker must have moved along with the verb;shauxiliary to the head of IP. This would then constitute evidence for rightward, string-adjacent head movement. In this article, I argue that this analysis actually makes different predictions than have been attested in Korean. Moreover, I argue that, following a well-known stand with respect to the nature of polarity sensitivity (Chierchia 2013), these facts follow naturally once it is assumed that in one variety, but not the other, universal quantifiers are positive polarity items. This makes the attested language-internal variation in Korean less exceptional since language-internal variation with respect to polarity sensitivity is widely attested.

In this article, we discuss two negative polarity item (NPI) adverbials: in years (and its cousins in days , in months , etc.) and until . We argue that much is to be gained by analyzing the two in juxtaposition. We first explore in years , following our approach in Iatridou and Zeijlstra 2017 ; on the basis of our analysis of this item, we then explore until . Our approach permits a unified account of until , whose behavior has led researchers to consider it lexically ambiguous. The commonalities between in years and our unified until also allow us to explain why both these boundary adverbials are strong as opposed to weak NPIs.

We argue for a uniformly upward-probing implementation of Agree (Upward Agree, UA), showing that it can account for a wide range of long-distance agreement phenomena, including cases that have been cited as evidence against earlier UA models of ϕ-agreement. Our core revision to earlier UA approaches is a distinction between checking and valuation: while we maintain that checking is strictly regulated by UA, we propose that valuation depends on a secondary relation of accessibility , which allows valuation of a higher probe by a lower, accessible goal, in cases where the checker of the probe cannot (fully) value it. This model provides a better account of asymmetries between Spec-head agreement and long-distance agreement patterns, and also accounts for movement-agreement interactions without a need for EPP features.

The generalization that V-to-I movement is conditioned by rich subject agreement on the finite verb (the Rich Agreement Hypothesis) has long been taken to indicate a tight connection between syntax and morphology. Recently, the hypothesis has been questioned on both empirical and theoretical grounds. Here, we demonstrate that the empirical arguments against this hypothesis are incorrect and that it therefore must be rehabilitated in its strongest form. Theoretically, we argue that the correlation between syntax and morphology is not direct (morphology does not drive syntax) but follows from principles of language acquisition: only if language learners are confronted with particular morphological contrasts do they postulate the presence of corresponding formal features that in turn drive syntactic operations.

Universal deontic modals may vary with respect to whether they scope over or under negation. For instance, English modals like must and should take wide scope with respect to negation; modals like have to and need to take narrow scope. Similar patterns have been attested in other languages. In this article, we argue that the scopal properties of modals with respect to negation can be understood if (a) modals that outscope negation are positive polarity items ( PPIs); (b) all modals originate in a position lower than I 0 ; and (c) modals undergo reconstruction unless reconstruction leads to a PPI-licensing violation.