publicly paper and electronic &les s docurnent in whole or in part. Signature of At!

This thesis investigates the interaction of the morphological process of verbal inflection with the syntactic process of verb movement and the distribution of the principal arguments. In Part I it is proposed that two apparently syntactic phenomena in the Germanic languages are accounted for by allowing the marphological component to filter syntactic derivations. First (Chapter I), it is proposed that the parametric variation in the licensing of the specifier of TP (an intermediate functional projection) can be derived from the verbal inflectional paradigms; certain morphological patterns require fusion, a requirement which in turn places restrictions on possible syntactic derivations. In Chapter II it is proposed that verbal inflection may take place via morphological merger, which requires adjacency. Syntactic operations which would disrupt the adjacency relation in the rnsrphoIogy are therefore blocked. In Part I1 the assumptions, common in the literature, which underlie the syntactic analyses in Part 1 are reconsidered. In particular it is argued in Chapter III that the base and derived positions of the principal arguments are stacked; that is, objects do not cross over subject