Is minimalism minimalist enough?: A look at agreement phenomena in a feature-free syntax

Abstract

Whether minimalism is, in fact, minimalist or not is a debate held pretty often in conceptual literature of theoretical linguistics. Some say the goal of minimalism is to get closer to the biolinguistic questions of the field, while others insist it has missed the mark and should be renewed and revised, more radically than ever before. One of latter type of people is Boeckx (2015), who argues that minimalism is no longer true to its intended purpose, and that it is time for a new approach; one that is more minimalist than minimalism has ever been. In this thesis, I attempt to summarise Boeckx’s views on minimalism, his own proposal, and its consequences. The bulk of the thesis will be dedicated to applying his ideas on the conceptual field of syntax to empirical research, thereby showing whether or not his ideas have consequences for theoretical syntacticians that should be deemed desirable, or perhaps undesirable. For current purposes, these empirical debates are restricted to the domain of agreement, including double agreement in Dutch, past participle agreement in French (and Italian), and the relation between verb movement and rich agreement (Rich Agreement Hypothesis).