{"id":18441,"date":"2026-11-09T06:01:34","date_gmt":"2026-11-09T11:01:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/?p=18441"},"modified":"2026-11-08T20:03:06","modified_gmt":"2026-11-09T01:03:06","slug":"katochoritis-tlc-at-the-university-of-vienna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2026\/11\/09\/katochoritis-tlc-at-the-university-of-vienna\/","title":{"rendered":"Katochoritis @ TLC at the University of Vienna"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our fourth-year student Ioannis Katochoritis<\/a> gave a talk at the Theoretical Linguistics Colloquium (TLC) at the University of Vienna on November 6, 2026, entitled “<\/span>It’s just a phase, it’ll pass: <\/span>The key to unlocking and moving on<\/span><\/a>”. Here is the abstract:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Rackowski and Richards (2005) propose that phases can be ‘unlocked’ to become transparent for extraction if they first Agree with a higher probe, which may then attract a goal from within the phase’s domain. Provided that phases count by default as potential movable interveners due to their featural make-up (Abels 2003), then prior Agree with the phase allows the probe to skip the phase boundary, as per Richards’ (1998) <\/span>Principle of Minimal Compliance<\/span> in (1). Thus, in many languages, extraction out of CPs or DPs requires the matrix verb to (\u03c6-)agree with the containing phase.<\/span><\/p>\n

(1) Once a probe P Agrees with a goal G, P can ignore G for the rest of the derivation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Although the research program of <\/span>Phase Unlocking<\/span> has been prolific (see a.o. van Urk & Richards 2015; Branan 2018; Halpert 2019; Hedding & Yuan 2023; Ershova 2024; Lee & Yip 2024), it still raises important questions: (i) Are unlocking and successive cyclicity both required to escape a phase or not? (ii) How is unlocking compatible with the Phase Impenetrability Condition (Chomsky 2000) and spell-out? (iii)\u00a0 How does the <\/span>Principle of Minimal Compliance<\/span> allow to ignore an intervening locality domain? (iv) Is unlocking an exceptional primitive operation or part of a broader strategy to undo opaqueness?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To address these issues, I propose the condition in (2), for which I will provide novel empirical evidence from Austronesian Malagasy and Tagalog:<\/span><\/p>\n

(2) Unlocking of phase XP requires remerge of XP to the edge of the probing head H, before an XP-embedded goal YP can subextract to a(n outer) SpecHP.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thus, Agree is not sufficient for unlocking; it is only movement of the containing phase into the projection of the probing head that makes that phase transparent for extraction, yielding a multiple-specifier configuration. I suggest that (2) can ultimately provide an answer to all four open questions above.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the end, (2) will also support the special status of phases as absolute cyclic locality domains, arguing against Halpert and Zeiljstra (2026), who subsume all phase-like locality effects to <\/span>Relativized Minimality <\/span>(Rizzi 1990).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our fourth-year student Ioannis Katochoritis gave a talk at the Theoretical Linguistics Colloquium (TLC) at the University of Vienna on November 6, 2026, entitled “It’s just a phase, it’ll pass: The key to unlocking and moving on”. Here is the abstract: Rackowski and Richards (2005) propose that phases can be ‘unlocked’ to become transparent for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-student-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18441"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18448,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18441\/revisions\/18448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}