Cliticization. The described approach to past participle agreement requires a movement analysis of cliticization.7 The clitic projection in its movement to its final landing site in the upper part of the clause, passes through Spec of AgrPstPrt and triggers agreement in a way parallel to the one assumed for the case of preverbal subject–verb agreement in finite clauses. The only difference between the two cases is related to the nature of the past participial morphology which only manifests gender and number features and no person feature. Xxxxx’s original account, as well as the subsequent literature on the topic, has typically left unexplained why such agreement process should be obligatory in some cases and optional in other cases which would otherwise meet the relevant configuration. Consider the difference in Italian, presented in section 2, between third-person clitics on the one side, obligatorily triggering past participle agreement, and first- and second-person clitics, doing so only optionally on the other. This pattern seems to identify an area of genuine optionality, also systematically manifested in the French paradigm of cliticization with clitics of all persons and numbers. The question is a complex one. Occurrence vs. non-occurrence of past participle agreement could in fact be a sign of different types of derivation: one involving passage through the Spec of the past participial projection, one not involving it (see Sportiche 1998: ch. 3). Alternatively, the different agreement pattern could be related to other independent differences, internal to Italian and between Italian and French. The system elaborated in Guasti and Xxxxx (2002) can provide a way of making the relevant distinction. In that work, the proposal is put forth that overt manifestation of agreement should in general be correlated to morphological checking taking place in the syntax; in particular, as far as verbal agreement is concerned, to syntactic Verb movement. Suppose that the hypothesis is made that the internal structure of the Agr past participial projection is more articulated than hypothesized so far in that it could involve different designated positions for clitics of different persons, with first and second person higher than third person. A way of accounting for the way the optionality is manifested in Italian suggests itself. If syntactic V movement implementing morphological checking takes place obligatorily in the first Agr head, but only optionally in the others, past pa...
Cliticization. 3.2 Wh-movement Object agreement
