Lexicon-syntax interface

Whether the Agree relationship that is established between these two instances of the Deo-feature involves movement or not will depend on the Deo-feature strength of uDeo: in languages where the latter is strong, we will observe left-periphery movements in imperative or subjunctive clauses, while in languages where it is weak, we will not observe such movements, because uDeo will be checked through a long-distance Agree configuration with iDeo without attracting any overt element to C.

In addition to accounting for the formal phenomena related to syntactic operations such as movement, the minimalist feature-based analysis that I just presented will also have broader relevance in the context of my study of the subjunctive. In particular, the idea that we have interpretable features that survive the syntactic derivation and affect the interpretation once they reach the interface with semantics will serve as the formal basis to explain the interpretative differences that we will observe between various types of subjunctive complements. In order to introduce the analysis that I will develop in that context, I will begin by briefly describing the minimalist notion of interface.

1.3.2 Lexicon-syntax interface

I will first look at the interface between lexicon and syntax, because this is where the features that I just discussed are claimed to originate from, under standard minimalist assumptions. I will abstract away from some of the more complex theoretical issues pertaining to this interface in general, such as the finer analysis related to converting lexical items into syntactic objects through the numeration stage, in order to just focus on those aspects that are relevant for my study. The most important notion that I will be using in this context is the one of selection, which involves an operation whereby a given SO takes out a separate item from the lexicon and introduces it into the structure. Although selection is usually related to a specific featural requirement of the selector, I will argue that this is not necessarily always the case (specifically, it is not the case when it comes to Elsewhere-type selection, which I will claim is at play in the context of Subj1 complementation).

The selection environment that will be most relevant in the context of this study is the one where the predicate (usually a verb) selects a given CP clausal type as its complement.

Depending on their lexical properties, verbs may require different types of embedded CP

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complements. The most obvious example of this is the fact that certain verbs require a declarative CP and others an interrogative CP in their complement clause, as shown by the grammaticality contrasts below:

(27) a. John thinks that Mary will come.

b. * John thinks if Mary will come.

(28) a. * John wonders that Mary will come.

b. John wonders if Mary will come.

I will claim that a similar situation obtains in the context of subjunctive vs. indicative complementation as well: indicative-selecting verbs require an embedded CP of the declarative type, such as the one in (27a), whereas subjunctive-selecting verbs require a different type of CP, namely the embedded imperative CP (as I already briefly explained earlier on in 1.2.2). As a result, the ungrammaticality that is caused by the introduction of an indicative-type complement under a subjunctive-selecting verb (as in (9), for instance) should be accounted for through a similar formal analysis as the one that was proposed in order to explain the grammaticality contrasts of the type exemplified in (27-28): in either case, the ungrammaticality is caused by the fact that the embedded CP-complement does not correspond to the selectional requirements of the matrix predicate.

One of the most important syntactic principles that has generally been claimed to govern the structural relationships involving selection is the locality constraint, which stipulates that the selector and the selectee must be in a local configuration (at least at some level of linguistic representation). Various versions of the locality constraint, which analyzed the latter as being more or less strict, have been proposed in generative literature at least since Chomsky (1965).

Without going too deeply into the various approaches that were put forward in this context, I will assume a relatively simple version of the locality constraint in my analysis of clausal complementation, stipulating that no embedded linguistic material should intervene between the selecting matrix predicate and the selected embedded CP (regardless of whether there is an overt complementizer or some other element in C or whether the latter is empty).²⁰ We can observe one manifestation of this type of locality constraint on the example of English below,

20 The only exception in this context might be extra-sentential topics, which are separated from the embedded clause through a prosodic break. I will not discuss such elements in this study.

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where we can see that not even fronted elements associated with the left periphery of the clause, such as the focalized negative constituent in (29-30), can intervene between the matrix verb and the complementizer situated in the embedded C-head that was selected by this verb.

(29) I said that under no circumstances should he leave.

(30) * I said under no circumstances that should he leave.

The notion of locality of selection will be important once I turn to the analysis of Slavic subjunctive, because it will allow me, among other things, to disambiguate between different possible structural descriptions that can be proposed in relation to a given type of subjunctive complement in a given language.

The final notion related to selection that will be relevant for my analysis of the subjunctive is the one of asymmetry: the selector and the selectee are assumed to be in an asymmetric-type relation. I will argue that this asymmetry should be observed both on the syntactic and on the semantic level. Syntactically, the selector must be in a hierarchically superior structural position with respect to the selectee, introducing the latter within its c-command domain. Semantically, the selector must define the basic lexical properties of the selectee (by determining the type of selectee it requires), but the selectee cannot have a meaningful impact on the semantics associated with the selector. When it comes to subjunctive complementation, this means that the selecting predicate must introduce a subjunctive CP clausal complement within its c-command domain as well as determine the basic semantic properties associated with this CP complement. Therefore, when the subjunctive is selected by the matrix predicate (i.e. in Subj1 complementation), the basic modal meaning denoted by the embedded CP clause should be fully determined by the matrix predicate, with subjunctive morphology per se being semantically vacuous in such cases. This analysis will be relevant once I turn to a more detailed comparative study of Subj1 and Subj2 complements later on in 6, because we will observe that Subj2-type complements establish a different type of relationship with the matrix predicate in this context, which is more symmetric in nature than the one we observe with Subj1. This will then serve as an additional argument for the claim that the subjunctive in such cases is not lexically selected by the matrix predicate.

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