ABSTRACT
This paper concerns External Merge of internal argument DP to VP and its theoretical implications. The author first shows that External Merge of internal argument DP to VP poses a problem not only for Chomsky's labeling algorithm but also for the Case-theoretic analysis of feature-inheritance, developed by Richards and Chomsky. Under the Case-theoretic analysis of feature-inheritance, T and V inherit unvalued phi from C and v*, respectively, and these heads T and V value Case in accord with the probe-goal theory of agreement, which limits "the goal of the probe to its complement, the smallest searchable domain". The external merge (EM) internal merge(IM) distinction IM can create a genuine "Spec", while EM cannot may correlate nicely with the duality of semantics: "EM yields generalized argument structure; and IM yields discourse-related properties such as old information and specificity, along with scopal effects".
