The overgeneration problem and the case of semipredicatives in Russian 35
Finally, in my earlier work I did not really say anything explicitly about the mech-
anism of agreement, but it was presumably again local, the result of co-indexing (of
the adjective) with anaphoric PRO, which in turn is in a chain of locally co-indexed
PROs, up to the head of that chain, which bears case. In this way, PRO itself does not
have case, but can transmit it. Similar look-ahead problems obtain as with the MTC
and probe-goal accounts, and similar checking solutions are possible, except that for
Franks (1995) it would have to be the case on the semipredicative that is checked, since
PRO had none.
In sum, since semipredicatives can agree with an NP much higher in the tree, the
only ways around look-ahead are either to reject an assignment model in favour of
checking or to postulate an assignment domain in which certain infinitival clauses do
not count. My own view about how to implement clause-internal agreement, which
will be elaborated in Section 6, is that we need the kind of “co-valuation” mechanism
that is afforded by feature sharing.
4.2 Va r i a t i o n
In this brief section I ask the following question: What do (or would) the various
approaches to SD have to say about the possibility of mixed judgments? Recall that I
refer to OC (agreement) as route A and the alternative (dative) as route B. The issue of
choosing between route A and route B leads directly to the next subsection.
For Babby, route A is VB, which is a matter of whether or not there is PROdat in
[Spec, InfP]. This would have to be sometimes optional, sometimes impossible, and
sometimes obligatory. While unclear how to implement, one idea is that the VB route
should in general be taken if available, but that whenever both routes are viable there
are two competing structures, as suggested above for (35).
Similarly, for MTC approaches, movement would have to be sometimes optional,
sometimes impossible, and sometimes obligatory. It is similarly unclear how to imple-
ment this, beyond the possibility of two competing structures, one which allows for
movement and the other which does not. Of course, this reduces to the larger general
problem of how optionality of movement is dealt with under minimalism.
For Landau, although his research does more than any other to highlight the real-
ity of mixed judgments, it seems to me that these arise only by virtue of various stipula-
tions. Since there is only one structure – namely, with a full CP – the effect of having
both route A and route B available derives primarily from the interaction of the fol-
lowing two assumptions (Landau 2008: 900): “in Russian, null C is a clitic, a lexical C is
not” and “when dominated by light v, C is an inaccessible goal for Agree.” These conspire
to give the required results, given particular additional assumptions about the specifics
of various constructions.