The Structure of Finnish CP and Feature Inheritance

Abstract

According to the feature inheritance hypothesis, functional heads inherit grammatical features from higher phase heads. Finite tense T, for example, inherits phi-features and/or the topic feature from C, while V inherits features from v*. Here we argue, based on new observations concerning the Finnish CP, relative clauses in particular, that feature inheritance applies also one step higher. Specifically, we argue that the lower Focus/operator head inherits features from the higher Force-head within the CP-layer. A new analysis of the structure of the Finnish CP is presented. The proposal is then positioned within a cross-linguistic theory of the CP-cartography. An analysis is presented where Finnish utilizes overt morphology and relatively few syntactic positions to express linguistic notions that in several other languages (e.g. Italian) are expressed by means of projecting distinct syntactic positions.