ANALYSIS OF SUBJECT CONTACT RELATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS BASED ON SPLIT FEATURE INHERITANCE

Abstract

This study examines the structure of subject contact relatives (SCRs) as exemplified by There's a man lives in China. Several problems with Doherty's (1994, 2000) relative clause (RC) analysis are identified, after which a truncated SCR structure is proposed instead that projects as far as Finite Phrase (FinP) in Rizzi's (1997) fine-grained CP system. Following Citko et al.'s (2018) split feature inheritance, we assume that the SCR's Fin gives its φ-features to T but keeps its EPP feature. The remaining EPP feature is checked off by the antecedent directly merged in Spec-FinP, and the T's φ-features are valued by an empty subject. This analysis accounts for several facts that earlier analyses of SCRs have difficulties capturing.