Vehicle Change Phenomena as an Argument for Move F

Three different formal devices have been proposed within minimalism to replace Chomsky’s (1993) covert movement of phrasal categories to check Case and agreement: expletive-associate relations (Brody 1995), movement of formal features (Chomsky 1995), and the operation Agree (Chomsky 2000, 2001). We propose that vehicle change effects (in the sense articulated by Fiengo and May (1994)) establish empirical grounds for distinguishing among these alternatives and argue that only the Move F approach can account for the data without enriching the theoretical apparatus