Case matching and syncretism in ATB-dependencies

Abstract

Syncretism has been reported to have the peculiar property of repairing violations of syntactic constraints, e.g. with agreement (Schütze 2003, Bhatt & Walkow 2013) and case matching (Citko 2005, van Craenenbroeck 2012). This paper puts forward the view that in one well-reported instance of syncretism repair of case-matching violations with ATB-movement, this repair follows directly from the nature of ATB movement. We pursue a novel movement-based analysis in which ATB movement involves the actual fusion of two syntactic objects, via intersection of feature sets. As well as deriving the one-to-many relation between fillers and gaps in ATB, we show how the ‘repair’ effect of syncretism with case matching violations follows naturally under this approach.