Starting from the observation that the constraints on VP-ellipsis (VPE) closely match those on VP-topicalization (VPT), Johnson (2001) proposes a movement account for VPE: in order for a VP to be deleted, it must first undergo topicalization. We show that although this proposal is attractive, making VPE dependent on VPT is problematic because VPE and VPT are not distributionally equivalent. While VPT targets the left periphery and consequently is subject to constraints on movement, VPE is not so restricted. We outline some alternatives for capturing the observed parallelism in the licensing of VPT and VPE.

Several proposals suggest a φ-feature dependency between C 0 and T 0 (see, e.g., Zwart 1993 , Chomsky 2008 ). In most (if not all) of these proposals, the core piece of empirical evidence is complementizer agreement (CA). On the basis of two sets of CA data, CA with coordinated subjects and CA with external possessors, we conclude that there is no φ-feature dependency between C 0 and T 0 ; instead, C 0 and T 0 must each be endowed with a discrete set of φ-features.

By analogy with the movement analysis of temporal clauses, some authors have proposed that conditional clauses be derived by leftward operator movement (Bhatt and Pancheva 2002, 2006, Arsenijević 2009, Tomaszewicz 2009). This movement analysis of conditional clauses is shown to account for the incompatibility of main clause phenomena and conditional clauses in terms of intervention effects. The cartographic implementation of this analysis predicts that conditional clauses will be incompatible with speaker-oriented modal expressions and that conditional clauses will lack the low-construal reading found in temporal clauses (Bhatt and Pancheva 2002, 2006). Thus, the absence of low construal in conditional clauses, which was initially taken to be an obstacle for the movement account of conditional clauses (see Citko 2000), becomes an argument in its favor.

This article examines the formalization of negative concord in terms of the Minimalist Program, focusing entirely on negative concord in West Flemish. It is shown that a recent analysis of negative concord that advocates Multiple Agree is empirically inadequate. Instead of Multiple Agree, a particular implementation of the simpler and less powerful binary Agree proves superior in deriving the data in question.

For some speakers of Italian (reported in Cinque 2004), Italian sembrare ‘seem’ has dual status. On the one hand, it is a lexical verb, with an experiencer argument; on the other hand, it behaves like a “restructuring verb.” In the latter case, sembrare is incompatible with an experiencer argument and it allows clitic climbing. This article identifies several contexts in which clitic climbing is not possible with sembrare and offers an account in terms of Cinque's proposals about the functional hierarchy of the clause. The article also examines sembler, the French cognate of sembrare , and argues, contra Cinque 2002, that it behaves like a lexical verb. Finally, it shows that the two instantiations of Italian sembrare correspond to two verbs in Dutch: schijnen and lijken .

This article analyzes aspects of the distribution of West Flemish verbs in terms of Kayne's (1994) antisymmetry approach. The distribution of the auxiliary in the Infinitivus pro Participio (IPP) construction provides evidence for three functional heads in the lower middle field: Neg, T, and F 2 . The word order in the IPP construction is derived by head movement of the auxiliary and XP-movement of the IPP complement. The IPP complement moves to [Spec, FP 2 ] to check its formal features; the finite auxiliary moves either to F 2 or to a higher functional head, T or Neg; the nonfinite auxiliary remains in F 2 . The analysis accounts for the finite/nonfinite asymmetry in the distribution of the negative affix en . The article includes concrete proposals for the implementation of feature checking.