The Extended Projection Principle (EPP) was proposed by Chomsky (1981, 1982) to account for why subjects are obligatory in English clauses. I define the EPP as the obligatory move of some element into the inflectional domain. A variety of EPP types have been identified cross-linguistically: (a) Massam and Smallwood (1997) argue that the EPP in Niuean is checked by VPs; (b) Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou (1998) argue that the EPP can vary in the size (Xº or XP) of the element that checks it; (c) Davies and Dubinsky (2001) argue for a contrast between D- and V-prominent EPP; and (d) Richards and Biberauer (2005) claim that the EPP pied-pipes the entire vP in some Germanic languages. I argue that the EPP can vary in three dimensions: (a) by having a head (Xº) or a phrase (XP) as a goal, (b) by pied-piping the entire vP or not, and (c) by targeting an argument/nominal (D) or a predicate (Pred). Combining these three dimensions gives us a total of 8 logical types, 7 of which are attested.
| Pied-piping | No pied-piping | |
| Dº-EPP | German
(Richards and Biberauer 2005) |
Greek
(Alexidou and Anagnostopoulou 1998) |
| Predº-EPP | Irish | Inuktitut
(Johns 2007) |
| DP-EPP | Afrikaans
(Richards and Biberauer 2005) |
English |
| PredP-EPP | indistinguishable from no pied-piping | Niuean
(Massam 2001) |
Some languages exhibit alternations between two EPP types, providing evidence that these different types are equivalent on some level. I will show that intra-linguistic alternations in EPP type target only one dimension of variation at a time. However, where Biberauer (2010) proposes that the various EPP occur independently and can co-occur, as each particular type alternates between presence versus absence, I show that the various EPP types are in complementary distribution. I will also show that these different movements are also united in being somewhat mysterious or unexplained.
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