Phase Theory: A Promising Approach to the Analysis of Semitic Construct State

Phase theory has been viewed as a promising approach to syntactic phenomena, minimizing the machinery apparatus needed to describe them, and meeting the „limited‟ capacity of human language faculty. A phase is said to be a unit of syntactic computation that can be sent to the PF and LF interfaces as an independent syntactic chunk (Chomsky 2000, et seq). This article proposes a phase approach to analyzing Semitic Construct State (CS). Based on Case as a distinguishing property in Arabic and Hebrew, I argue that Semitic CS is a phase KP headed by K. My proposal ensues from several CS facts, which are phasal in nature, such as i) the GDC (=genitive DP complement) is a „phase Spellout domain,‟ by virtue of being (and always) assigned Gen Case by its head, ii) KP is necessitated by the GDC‟s Gen Case, iii) a CS has an escape hatch which is an available site for reconstruction, iv) an embedded CS involves multiple Spellouts and successive cyclic movements, and v) K is assumed to be ɸ-complete, and that D inherits its Agree Feature from K (cf. Chomsky, 2008). It is hypothesized that a CS minimally consists of two DP layers, viz. the head-DP and the GDC-DP, which is based on the assumption that the head N can take the definite article. These two DPs must be linearized before being sent to the interfaces. Hence the head-DP exits the domain of K, and targets Spec-KP. K values its Gen Case via Agree with the GDC-DP, and the [uCase] feature of the head DP is valued via Agree established between it and an external head (possibly T/v).