Remarks on Derivation by Phase.
John Frampton, Sam Gutmann, Julie Legate, and Charles Yang, October 2000.

In Derivation by Phase, Chomsky revises the feature system and the mechanisms of agreement and deletion developed in his earlier Minimalist Inquiries. Specifically, uninterpretable features on a head now enter the derivation "unvalued." A head which assigns structural case, for example, will contain unvalued f-features and nominals will contain an unvalued Case-feature. The Agree operation incorporates mechanisms for providing values to unvalued features under appropriate conditions. Later, at the end of a phase, the newly valued features will be recognized as such and deleted from the syntactic representation that is the current state of the continuing derivation. These newly-valued features do persist long enough to be part of the material handed over to the morphological and phonological components at the end of phases.

We look at the new system in detail, uncover some problems with it, and suggest ways in which the Agree operation can be modified in order to overcome these problems.

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