Phases

Overview

We will look at recent work by Chomsky suggesting that syntactic structure is built up in phases (with phases including CP and transitive vP). At the end of each phase, part of the syntactic structure already formed undergoes transfer to the phonological and semantic components, with the result that the relevant part of the structure is inaccessible to further syntactic operations from that point on. (An important point of detail to note is that since we are outlining Chomsky’s ideas on phases here, we shall follow his assumptions about the structure of verb phrases and expletive structures.)