Features vs. Constraint Hierarchy: Verb Movement in English

Abstract

This article is concerned with V movement on the basis of V features within the Minimalist Program, focusing on the paradigm of the English mood. With respect to do-support, nominative case, and V raising, I argue for the feature reductions of finiteness which took place after the loss of mood morphology in the history of English: from [+Tense, +Agr, +Mood] to [+Tense, +Agr] in the indicative, from [+Tense, +Agr, +Mood] to [+Agr] in the subjunctive, and from [+Tense, +Agr, +Mood] to [+Tense] in the imperative. The crucial criterion for Tense is whether auxiliary do can be inserted into I, while subjunctive Agr is there to be activated under head adjacency in order to check off nominative case of its subject.
By contrast, I examine optimality-theoretic approach to clause structure, pointing out some inadequacies of constraint rankings on the evidence of historical data, and conclude that I will abandon constraint-hierarchical Optimality in favor of feature-oriented Minimalism.