ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the halting aka criterial freezing phenomenon analyzed in Epstein 1992 as an arguably deducible ("last resort") effect of Chomsky's Strong Minimalist Thesis (SMT), encapsulated as "computationally efficient satisfaction of bare output conditions". In the analysis authors proposes here seeks to eliminate a syntactic constraint and reassign its empirical effects to independently motivated interpretive constraints. In this section, we review Chomsky's labeling analysis of A'-movement and Epstein, Kitahara and Seely (EKS)'s extension of it to A-movement. Each explains, informally speaking, "obligatory exit" from intermediate position as the result of labeling failure-ultimately, a conceptual-intentional (CI) interface violation of Full Interpretation (FI). The intuition that authors would likes to pursue is that in Japanese, each overt Case particle constitutes an independent head, while in English, abstract Case is part of a nominal head. This chapter argues that independently motivated morpho-phonological, CI requirements naturally account for certain "criterial freezing" effects.
