The cartography of phases

This paper investigates the relation between cartographic and phasal heads in the light of Chomsky’s recent proposals (2007) of feature transfer from C to T; the data come from Meiteilon, a language that lacks Tense morphology. I argue that the evidence from this language provides striking confirmation for the proposals that something like T exists even in languages without Tense, insofar that this head inherits uninterpretable features from a higher C-like dominating head. Moreover, the evidence from finite clausal complementation in the language shows that such feature transfer/inheritance relations are restricted to within phases.

Published online: 23 June 2010
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.156.14kid