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In this paper, I explore the Defective Intervention effects in the past transitive structures in two dialects of Kurdish, where variation is found in how agreement shows up on the verb. In the Northern dialect, in the presence of a Dative subject, the verb displays full agreement with the Nominative object (in person and number), whereas, in the Central dialect, in the same context, the default third person singular agreement obtains. It will be shown that the Defective Intervention as proposed in Chomsky (2000) and assumed in much subsequent work in the Minimalist Program is not adequate to explain the varied pattern of agreement attested in Kurdish past transitive structures. Drawing on the structural differences in the past transitive constructions in the two dialects, I will introduce a modification into the current formulation of Defective Intervention to the effect that in Dative-Nominative structures, agreement with the Nominative DP is blocked by the intervention of a φ-complete head that licenses the Dative DP and not by the intervention of the Dative DP itself. This approach to Defective Intervention predicts that in structures where the Dative DP is licensed by a φ-incomplete head, the Defective Intervention effects will not arise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rigors of the Minimalist Program eliminate movement operations, traces, and 1980s-style conditions of government. This article emphasizes poverty-of-stimulus problems, reviews lexical government effects, and captures them (and more) by treating certain deletion as cliticization. This analysis carves up the grammatical world differently, linking former “movement” conditions with phonological reductions, VP ellipsis, gapped verbs, some agreement relations, etc. The productivity of the analysis supports the rigors of the Minimalist Program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of the language faculty pursued within the tradition of generative grammar focuses on a natural object, the cognitive capacity that our species possesses for knowledge, acquisition, and use of natural languages. This line of research investigates a component of the human mind/brain, and is pursued within the federating framework of the cognitive neurosciences. Three major steps of this research trend are examined here: the modeling of the language faculty as a computational capacity, the study of language invariance and variation through parametric models, and the guidelines of the Minimalist program. After a presentation of the logic of the parametric approach to language variation, some properties of the micro- versus macro-comparative study of syntax are examined. The basic guidelines of the Minimalist program are illustrated, with special reference to the role of economy principles; some consequences of minimalist ideas for general issues such as innateness and task-specificity of the language faculty are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argues that an account of island effects can be given that is compatible with the Minimal Link Condition. Failure to account for fundamental properties of movement; Explanation for the cross-linguistic variation with respect to wh-island phenomena.