On Subject auxiliary inversion in English

주어-조동사 도치에 관한 소고

It has been one of the puzzles in the English syntax that so called the rule of subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI) is not allowed in subject wh-movement while it is not obligatory in non-subject wh-movement in a root sentence. This asymmetry has been a puzzle since SAI itself was thought to be a part of question construction as we can observe from yes/no questions. The asymmetry gets more complicated in terms of sentence embedding, i.e no SAI is permitted in the embedded context in question. The goal of this paper is to suggest an unified analysis for this unsolved grammatical phenomena on the basis of Rizzi (1997)'s recent work. The main idea is that SAI is not a I-to-C movement but one of I-to-Focus where Focus is a functional category and its phrase is located between CP and IP. The other proposal is that Wh-movement is no more homogeneous in terms of landing site between a root and an embedded sentence: the target for a wh-phrase in the former is the Spec of FocP (Focus Phrase) but the one in the latter is the Spec of CP as the standard theory assumes. Pesetsky (l999)'s analysis is discussed and its theoretical and empirical shortages are pointed out. Its rather radical proposals such as the one that the nominative case is just an uninterpretable tense feature of DP and the other that 'that' is no longer a complementizer but an element of I(nflection) make it less acceptable in spite of the possibility that it can get rid of Case theory entirely, which would be ideal in the spirit of minimalism.