CHAPTER OUTLINE
In the previous chapter we encountered a particular syntactic dependency: case. Even though sentences containing constituents with the wrong case marking would be semantically good, syntax does not allow them. In this chapter we will see that case is not the only kind of syntactic dependency that can be identified. There are more constructions that, from a semantic perspective, would be good, but that syntax does not like. For instance, sentences like *I walks (instead of I walk) or *She walk (instead of She walks) are bad. Other examples are sentences like *John hopes that Mary loves himself (instead of John hopes that Mary loves him), or *I love me (instead of I love myself). These sentences are clearly ungrammatical, even though it is not that hard to figure out what they could mean. The big question that arises is whether all these syntactic dependencies are different in nature, or underlyingly the same. The latter would be the best outcome, since in that event there is only one mechanism in syntax that we need to understand rather than several. Indeed it turns out that all these syntactic dependencies are the result of a single mechanism: agreement.
Insight: Agreement Reflects Syntactic Dependencies
The previous two chapters introduced two main constraints on what you can create with the Merge operation: θ-theory and Case theory. θ-theory is essentially a semantic constraint; verbal categories that merge with too few or too many arguments yield degraded sentences, since the meaning of the verb dictates how many arguments it should merge with. θ-theory has an effect on syntax, since it partly determines the structural size, but it is not a syntactic constraint. Case theory, by contrast, is a syntactic constraint. Sentences that are perfect from a semantic point of view (She loves I instead of She loves me) are ruled out by the syntax. Every DP should be assigned case, and particular structural positions are responsible for particular case assignments.
A question that may now arise is whether there are more syntactic dependencies than just those involving case assignment. The answer is yes.
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