Morphology of extraction: Reappraising vP phasehood
An important question of phase theory is which heads are phasal. There is a fair amount of consensus that CP constitutes a phase, but the identity and distribution of other phase heads is much less securely established. We focus on one type of argument for vP phases — morphological alternations — and develop an account that does not attribute them to successive-cyclic movement and hence phasehood. Our alternative account attributes these alternations to a structural-adjacency condition on the realization of Agree chains. We argue that this account overcomes certain problems that vP-phase accounts face. Consequently, morphological alternations triggered by local subjects vs. other phrases no longer constitute an argument for vP phasehood.
