Abstract
The ECP has a curious conjunctive condition; a trace must be either lexically governed or antecedent-governed. However, it seems that given the theory of Barriers proposed by Chomsky 1986a, the requirement of lexical government can not only be reduced to the one of antecedent government, but is also insufficient to account for the distributional properties of traces created by LF wh-movement rule. Consequently, the ECP has only the requirement of antecedent government. But as this simplified ECP raises other problems, a principle of γ-assignment is proposed to solve them. Moreover, it is also pointed out that this principle can resolve the problems left unsettled by the previous analyses concerning the ECP.
