Deriving idiolectal variation: English wh-raising

International audienceThe focus of this paper is on apparent cases of subject-to-subject raising out of finite clauses in English, which are accepted as (fully) grammatical by a minority of native speakers. The basic pattern involves a bi-clausal structure in which a displaced subject triggers agreement in both the embedded and the matrix clause. Crucially, this ‘double agreement’ pattern is only acceptable when a subject is wh-moved. Our analysis builds on the criterial approach to subject extraction developed in Rizzi (2006) and Rizzi & Shlonsky (2006, 2007). We propose that the main ingredient of the wh-raising pattern is incorporation of a functional head in the embedded left periphery into the matrix V