On the CP shell

Abstract

The system of feature inheritance from C to T entails the syntactic presence of C in any tensed clause where Agree and Case assignment take place. However, the complementizer that, which is conventionally assumed to head a tensed clause, never appears in a main clause in English, and this empirical fact implies that the complementizer occupies a higher syntactic position than C. Here emerges the necessity to postulate a CP shell above CP. The author suggests labeling this shell as cP, headed by the complementizer that. The specifier of little c is the target of wh-movement in embedded clauses whereas the null head C contains various features associated with such syntactic operations as feature inheritance, negative inversion, and wh-movement in main clauses.