IF THE HEAD FITS - ON THE MORPHOLOGICAL DETERMINATION OF GERMANIC SYNTAX

This paper investigates the role of morphology-syntax interactions in explaining apparent parametric variation in Germanic syntax. It is arg ued that the Spec, TP parameter (Bures 1993; Bobaljik and Jonas 1996) is a reflex of aspects of the inflectional morphology that divide the Germanic languages into two groups, and not simply an arbitrary parame ter as previously assumed. The theory of distributed morphology is ado pted and leads to the following position. Complementary distribution b etween tense and agreement markers in a language must be taken to refl ect FUSION of the functional heads in that language. This fusion is on ly possible if head movement in the syntax has concatenated the releva nt heads in a specific configuration. The required configuration in tu rn follows from a derivation that precludes the licensing of Spec;TP. Thus, only languages that do not have this complementarity in their in flectional morphology may utilize the syntactic derivation that licens es the specifier of TP.