Agreement is Feature Sharing
In our paper Cyclic Computation (1999), considerable progress was made in simplifying syntactic computation, within the general framework of the Minimalist Program. Comparison of derivations was eliminated from the theory, along with the need for numerations. Chomsky's Derivation by Phrase (2000) proceeded along partially overlapping lines. In it, Chomsky introduced the important idea of valued versus unvalued features and shifted from the idea of feature checking to the idea of feature valuation. In this paper we adopt this idea and proceed by first reviewing the main ideas of the feature valuation analysis, then suggest that feature valuation is best seen as feature sharing. Rather than a valued feature giving a value to an unvalued counterpart, agreement should be realized as the sharing of a single feature between two syntactic terminals. With the mechanism of feature sharing in hand, we will then be in a position to revise our earlier proposals and dramatically simplify both the analysis and the computation which is specified.
Download file as [
PDF] or [Postscript]. (draft, 32 pages)