UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 9 (1997)
Checking features and split
signs
ANNABEL CORMACK & NEIL SMITH
Serial and quasi-serial constructions pose an interesting problem for Checking Theory, as the
inflectional morphology relating to Tense may appear on two verbal heads. We argue that a
head
may occur as a 'split sign', with its LF-interpretable and PF-interpretable parts merged at
different
positions in a derivation. The PF-interpretable part determines the morphology on V, the
LF-interpretable part determines the appropriate interpretation. We show that Tense must
check
one or more accessible Infl heads: that is, checking is not essentially one to one, and the parts
of a
split sign are subject to checking in a configuration which may be non-local.
[PDF file]