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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 26, No. 0, pp.380-395
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Mar 2026
Received 28 Jan 2026 Revised 28 Feb 2026 Accepted 01 Mar 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.26..202603.380

Revisiting the Subject Condition: A Miracle Creed Perspective

Jaejun Kim
Lecturer, Division of English Language and Literature Dongguk University Myeongjin Hall 156, 30, Pildong-ro 1-gil, Jung-gu Seoul, Korea, Tel: +82-2-2260-8705 kjj8286@dgu.ac.kr


© 2026 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper investigates the Subject Condition within the recently developed Miracle Creed (MC) framework (Chomsky 2024), proposing that the selective opacity of subjects is not an independent or construction-specific constraint, but rather an emergent property arising from the interplay between the Labeling Algorithm and the MC framework. While recent minimalist approaches have attributed subject islandhood to uniform phasehood or resource limitations, such accounts often struggle to derive the empirical transparency of passive, unaccusative, and in-situ subjects. To address this, the present study proposes the notion of labeling stabilization. We argue that a structurally indeterminate object becomes computationally stable and transparent for further extraction if and only if it is properly labeled (via a head-complement configuration or feature-sharing). Typical subjects fail to achieve this external stabilization before moving to a subsequent position, resulting in stacked unresolved {XP, YP} configurations. To maintain computational efficiency, the system freezes such deeply indeterminate constituents in situ. Conversely, subjects that are properly labeled prior to displacement remain structurally transparent, allowing extraction. By deriving the systematic asymmetry between subject types from the Labeling Algorithm and the boxing mechanism, this study demonstrates how classical island effects follow naturally from the internal logic of the MC framework without resorting to ad hoc stipulations.

Keywords:

Duality of Semantics, Labeling Algorithm, Minimal Search, Miracle Creed, Subject Condition

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