How Subjects and Possessors Can Obviate Phasehood

Recent proposals on phases claim that locality restrictions are obviated when the subject of a clausal phase has certain syntactic or discourse properties, suggesting that phasehood is acquired over the course of a derivation. I evaluate these claims with acceptability judgment experiments and argue that these phase-related locality effects can be derived from independently motivated principles, such as Feature Inheritance/Value-Transfer Simultaneity or the Principle of Minimal Compliance. I further point out similar effects with possessors and nominals in English, expanding the empirical domain. The nominal data constitute a novel argument for treating nominals as phases and strengthen the case for a general theory of phases that can account for these effects.