Agreement and Movement

The operation Move is defined in Chomsky (1999, 2000) as a composite operation consisting of three components: Agree, Identify and Merge, taking Agree as a necessary condition for Move. Therefore, I call this definition of Move as the Agree-based Move. In this paper, I argue that the Agree-based approach to Move cannot be maintained; I claim that the Selection-based approach to Move, in which the EPP-feature is analyzed as an s-selectional property of a head, offers a more natural account of the sentences under consideration. I believe that the three components of Move as defined in (6) happen to co-occur in the derivation of certain sentences, as the composite transformation called Passivization does in the derivation of a passive sentence like “the city was destroyed by the enemy.” On the basis of these observations, I conclude that Agree and Move should be regarded as separate computational operations; the task of Agree is to erase uninterpretable features of both probe and goal, and that of Move is to satisfy the EPP-feature, which should be taken as an s-selectional feature.