ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to discuss evidence showing that each of the inflectional elements assumed to belong under the I node in the standard analysis, henceforth the Ianalysis, behaves like an independent syntactic category in the sense of X-bar theory. The evidence consists of attempts to show that some facts drawn from a relatively broad range of languages can best be explained if each of these elements is assumed to head its own maximal projection. The inflectional elements discussed are NEG(ation), Tense (TNS), AGR(eement), ASP(ect) and the PASS(ive) morpheme. The conclusions reached on the basis of the evidence presented are shown to lead to some rethinking of the structural properties of sentences and the distribution of the inflectional elements inside them. In addition, two parameters are suggested to account for some aspects of typological variation relating to the periphrastic/morphological distinction in active and passive sentences. It is argued that this distinction reduces to a distinction in the grammatical features, more precisely the categorial features, of the functional categories involved, namely ASP and PASS, in combination with the m-selectional properties of the TNS category and the general principles of UG.
