ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the early use of features in the Minimalist Program, in which strong features triggered overt movement and weak features resulted in covert movement. Minimalist analyses in which the feature that needs to be checked is separated from the feature that triggers movement. The chapter demonstrates how a feature system allows for the features to be treated as entities that are separate from the lexical items that introduce them. It discusses whether the move to a feature-based system has led to unwarranted flexibility. Based on data from Malagasy and other languages, the chapter argues that the greater power of the feature system may be justified insofar as it allows us to explain the combinatorial possibilities observed in language variation. Acquisition of language-specific uses of displacement, then, would reduce to the acquisition of the feature system. Features have been used in generative grammar since its inception, but never have they had such a central role.
