There is strong evidence for 'object shift' in English. That is, just as there is an 'EPP position' high in the sentence where subjects and derived subjects wind up, there is a similar 'EPP position' in the VP region where objects and ECM subjects (among other categories) wind up. The evidence comes from several phenomena. First, for various binding purposes ECM subjects act as if they are higher than elements in the higher clause. (1) is a representative example involving Condition A satisfaction:

     (1) The DA proved [two men to have been at the scene of the crime] during each other's trials

Other parallel examples involve weak crossover and negative polarity item licensing. Under the standard assumption that c-command is involved in all of these phenomena, and given that the adverbial clauses containing the item that needs to be licensed is in the higher clause, the acceptability of examples like (1) indicates that the ECM subject is in the higher clause as well.

In the kinds of paradigms just mentioned, the behavior of ECM subjects is comparable to that of transitive objects. The following example parallels (1):

     (2) The DA accused two men during each other's trials

Note that under reasonable (though not universally accepted) assumptions about clause structure, even direct object is not high enough to c-command into an adverbial adjunct. So, under those assumptions, even object raises. The null hypothesis is that object and ECM subject raise to the same higher position.

An additional argument for raising of an object or an ECM subject has to do with the Pseudogapping ellipsis construction. This construction is exemplified in (3).

     (3) Mary hired John, and Susan will [hire] Bill

Plausibly, the construction involves VP ellipsis, with the remnant having escaped from the ellipsis site via a movement operation, object shift.

The clausal phrase structure proposed by Chomsky (1991) provides a possible target for the raising motivated by the above phenomena: [Spec, AgrO], where AgrO is a functional head just above VP. Chomsky had suggested that such raising exists, but that it is covert, happening in the LF component. However, there are good reasons, which I will summarize, to think that the raising is actually overt with raising of V to a still higher position. Covert movement, on the other hand, will typically involve formal features alone, hence does not create any relevant binding or licensing configurations. The 'split-VP' hypothesis of Koizumi (1993) and Koizumi (1995), which I adopt in its essentials, provides the needed structure for overt raising. Within such an approach, it is natural to assume that the 'EPP' feature driving raising to 'subject position' resides in Agr, hence is also responsible for raising to 'object position', under the plausible assumption of Chomsky (1991) that 'AgrS' and 'AgrS' are merely mnemonic, there really being just Agr, which can occur in various places in the structure. This result constitutes part of a promising reduction of an apparent asymmetry between subject and object. However, unlike the situation with 'subject shift', object shift is not obligatory. First, extraction out of an object is much more acceptable than extraction out of a subject (the CED effect):

     (4) ?*Who was [a picture of t] selected
     (5)  Who did you select [a picture of t]

As Branigan (1992) points out, if object and subject both necessarily raise overtly, to [Spec, AgrO] and [Spec, AgrS] respectively, whatever constraint is responsible for CED effects cannot distinguish (4) from (5). I will explore a number of interactions between extraction and 'high' binding effects, all of them indicating that when the object or ECM subject is high, extraction out of that NP is degraded, in accord with the CED.

Verb-particle constructions provide additional evidence. Johnson (1991) persuasively argues that the order V-NP-prt arises from the raising of the NP from its base position, and the further raising of the V portion of the 'particle-verb'. Pairs like the following, then, indicate that the raising of the NP is optional:

     (6)   Mary called up friends of John
     (7)  ?Mary called friends of John up

When the NP precedes the particle, extraction out of the NP is seriously degraded, as now expected:

     (8)   Who did Mary call up friends of
     (9) ?*Who did Mary call friends of up

Finally, I will examine a very interesting verb-particle construction first discussed by Kayne (1985) and later analyzed by Johnson (1991) as involving overt raising of the ECM subject 'John'.

     (10)  Mary made John out to be a fool

Observe that the raising seen in (10) is optional. For most speakers, (12) is an acceptable alternative to (10).

     (11)  Mary made out John to be a fool

Thus, we have yet another instance of optional object shift. The scope properties of the construction prove particularly interesting, so I will examine them in some detail.

Bibliography

• Branigan, Philip. 1992. Subjects and complementizers. Doctoral dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
• Chomsky, Noam. 1991. Some notes on economy of derivation and representation. In Principles and parameters in comparative grammar, ed. Robert Freidin, 417-454. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Johnson, Kyle. 1991. Object positions. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 9: 577-636.
• Kayne, Richard. 1985. Principles of particle constructions. In Grammatical representation, ed. Jacqueline Gueron et al., 101- 140. Dordrecht: Foris.
• Koizumi, Masatoshi. 1993. Object agreement phrases and the split VP hypothesis. In Papers on Case and Agreement I: MIT working papers in linguistics 18, 99-148.
• Koizumi, Masatoshi. 1995. Phrase structure in minimalist syntax. Doctoral dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
• Lasnik, Howard. 1995. A note on pseudogapping. In Papers on minimalist syntax, MIT working papers in linguistics 27, 143- 163. [Reprinted, with minor revisions, in Lasnik (1999) Minimalist Analysis, Blackwell.]
• Lasnik, Howard. 1998a. On a scope reconstruction paradox. Ms. University of Connecticut. Posted on 'Chomsky Celebration' web page.
• Lasnik, Howard. 1998b. Some reconstruction riddles. In University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 5(1), 83-98.
• Lasnik, Howard. 1999. Chains of arguments. In Working minimalism, ed. Samuel D. Epstein and Norbert Hornstein. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.