FEATURE TRANSFER, LEFT PERIPHERY, AND CASE CONVERSION

Agreement Beyond Phi, by Shigeru Miyagawa, MIT Press, 2017, xvii+243pp.

Abstract

Based on Chomsky’s (2001) Uniformity Principle, Miyagawa (2017) advances the thesis called Strong Uniformity (SU), which states that all languages are equipped with the same inventory of grammatical features, and that those features are overtly manifested in one way or another in each language. The present article places under careful scrutiny some of the major findings and proposals that Miyagawa puts forth, especially those concerning the syntax of ‘why’ and Nominative/Genitive Conversion, with particular attention paid to the syntactic operation known as Feature Inheritance. It is also demonstrated that working with Miyagawa’s core ideas and implementing them in a slightly different way may yield fruitful results.