Determinacy and the CP-TP Bottleneck
elly van gelderen
December 2022 

In the last 25 years, generative grammar has undergone a paradigm shift from relying on principles in Universal Grammar to principles that are less specific to the faculty of language. These are usually referred to as Third Factors. In this paper, I take one such non-language specific principle, namely determinacy, and apply it to variation and change in the CP-TP layer, focusing on English and Dutch. I show that variation surrounding Verb-second, TP-expletives, that-trace, C-deletion, and subject-less relatives is due to the need for an efficient computation of the CP-TP boundary.

Format:	[ docx ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007191 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	paper under review for a volume edited by Ermenegildo Bidese and Federica Cognola
keywords:	c-deletion, cp-tp boundary, determinacy, subject-less relatives, that-trace, tp-expletives, verb-second, syntax
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