CHAPTER OUTLINE
We have seen that words or constituents can remerge. Remerge, also known as movement, explains a lot of things. Thanks to Remerge we are able to understand that a constituent can appear in a position far removed from the case and θ-role assigner on which it depends. And, by assuming that subjects start out in the VP and are subsequently remerged, we are able to treat all syntactic dependencies on a par, including the previously problematic nominative case relation between a subject and Fin. But what we don't yet understand is why elements must remerge. Why do subjects remerge into FinP, and Wh-phrases into CP? In this chapter we address this question, and we will conclude that the same feature-checking mechanism that we have already used to characterise syntactic dependencies provides us with the trigger for such instances of Remerge.
Insight: Agreement Triggers Remerge
In the previous chapter, we established that constituents – heads and phrases alike – can be remerged into the structure we build, thereby giving rise to the effect that we know as movement. By adopting this notion of Remerge we were able to understand a number of phenomena that would otherwise remain rather mysterious. In addition, it allowed us to maintain generalisations that would otherwise be lost, such as our unified characterisation of syntactic dependencies in terms of [F]–[uF] feature checking.
The fact that we can analyse certain phenomena as involving Remerge, however, does nothing to explain why these instances of Remerge actually take place. Take two significant Remerge operations that we have considered: (i) Remerge of a Wh-constituent to a clause-initial position and (ii) Remerge of the subject from VP to FinP.
(1) a. Which yellow chair has Adrian always liked <which yellow chair>?
b. The teachers are all <the teachers> dancing on the table.
Assuming that Remerge has taken place in (1a) allowed us to maintain our restrictions on case agreement, and to assume that θ-role assignment is strictly local, and always takes place within the VP. These reasons also accounted for remerger of the subject in (1a) from spec-VP to spec-FinP, and for the presence of the floating quantifier all between the auxiliary and main verb.
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