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Antisymmetry and the Conservation of C-Command: Scrambling and Phrase Structure in Synchronic and Diachronic Perspective

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Antisymmetry and the Conservation of C-Command: Scrambling and Phrase Structure in Synchronic and Diachronic Perspective University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations Fall 2009 Antisymmetry and the Conservation of C-Command: Scrambling and Phrase Structure in Synchronic and Diachronic Perspective Joel C. Wallenberg University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Comparative and Historical Linguistics Commons, and the Syntax Commons Recommended Citation Wallenberg, Joel C., "Antisymmetry and the Conservation of C-Command: Scrambling and Phrase Structure in Synchronic and Diachronic Perspective" (2009). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 77. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/77 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/77 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Antisymmetry and the Conservation of C-Command: Scrambling and Phrase Structure in Synchronic and Diachronic Perspective Abstract Holmberg’s Generalization (Holmberg 1986) was originally stated to describe the “object shift” phenomena found in the modern Scandinavian languages. This dissertation argues that object shift is merely a subcase of scrambling, a type of adjunction, and that Holmberg’s Generalization is a subcase of a universal constraint, the “Generalized Holmberg Constraint” (GHC), which prohibits leftward scrambling across c-commanding functional heads. The existence of such a constraint turns out to have ramifications far beyond the analysis of scrambling itself, and the predictions it makes ultimately form an extended argument in favor of a universal antisymmetric approach to phrase structure (Kayne 1994). The most important evidence for the GHC comes from diachronic data. The study presents quantitative data from the history of Yiddish and English to show that, in cases where a language undergoes major changes in its clause structure, the GHC remains an active and stable constraint in the language, indicating its status as a universal. Once a phrase structure change begins, the resulting variation within a single speech community, and even within individuals, immediately shows the effect of the GHC on scrambling. The latter portion of the study argues that the GHC is not merely a constraint on scrambling, but rather a much more general constraint on the way syntactic computations progress, the “Conservation of C- Command.” The Conservation of C-Command finds a natural cross-linguistic formulation only if we adopt an antisymmetric approach to languages with head-final phrase structures. This approach turns out to have consequences for a variety of other problems of syntactic analysis, including the West Germanic Verb (Projection) Raising construction and Heavy NP Shift. This dissertation accounts for the typology of scrambling found in the world’s languages and during periods of language change, and shows that the way in which scrambling is constrained provides insight into basic properties of phrase structure. In addition, it constitutes an extended argument for the autonomy of syntax: while prosodic and pragmatic considerations favor leftward scrambling in a number of contexts, a language’s inventory of functional heads puts a strict upper bound on whether scrambling can respond to these considerations. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Linguistics First Advisor Anthony S. Kroch Keywords syntax, scrambling, language change, historical, Germanic Subject Categories Comparative and Historical Linguistics | Syntax This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/77 ANTISYMMETRY AND THE CONSERVATION OF C-COMMAND: SCRAMBLING AND PHRASE STRUCTURE IN SYNCHRONIC AND DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVE Joel C. Wallenberg A DISSERTATION in Linguistics Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2009 Supervisor of Dissertation Anthony S. Kroch, Professor of Linguistics Graduate Group Chair person Eugene Buckley, Associate Professor of Linguistics Dissertation Committee Anthony S. Kroch, Professor of Linguistics Donald Ringe, Professor of Linguistics, Department Chair Charles Yang, Associate Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science Höskuldur Thráinsson, Professor of Icelandic, University of Iceland (Háskóli Íslands) Antisymmetry and the Conservation of C-Command: scrambling and phrase structure in synchronic and diachronic perspective COPYRIGHT 2009 Joel Constine Wallenberg iii Acknowledgements I would first and foremost like to thank my wife, Caitlin Light, whose intellectual and emotional support made this possible in any number of ways. Anthony Kroch has been an outstanding advisor and mentor to me, both in terms of my development as a linguist (and the development of many specific analyses that appear here and elsewhere), and in terms of my general thinking about many aspects of life. As Immanuel Kant once wrote of David Hume, Tony “woke me from my dogmatic slumber”. A great deal of credit for my intellectual development as a linguist goes to the faculty and students of the University of Pennsylvania. But before I give in to the urge to list them all (which I’m fighting), I would like to thank my dissertation committee, most of whom have been with me on this journey since the proposal stage: Don Ringe, Höskuldur Thráinsson, and Charles Yang. I would like to single out Don Ringe as a second mentor to me, and to thank him for convincing me that I’m as much an historical linguist at heart as I am a syntactician; I hope I can live up to that! He always shows up with clear and exceptionally well-informed thinking on every subject he addresses. Similarly, thank you to Bill Labov and Gillian Sankoff for convincing me that variation and change always go hand in hand, and I promise to keep variation and language contact in mind when addressing any linguistic problem. Thanks also to Julie Legate for a number of comments on various stages of this project. iv Many thanks go to Beatrice Santorini, for a great deal of insightful discussion, especially concerning Early and Modern Yiddish data, as well as much help in working with parsed corpora in general. I also want to thank her for being an excellent friend and helping me address a number of difficult issues late in the process of writing this dissertation. The students (many now faculty) at Penn who have influenced me are far too many to name individually, but here are a small few of those to whom I owe gratitude. Thank you Marjorie Pak for many interesting discussions, but especially for suggesting that I should look at Kayne’s Antisymmetry Hypothesis! Five minutes of discussion of the issue with you was enough to change the course of my research for years. Thank you to my cohort at Penn – congratulations guys, we all finished! – and especially to Tatjana Scheffler and Maya Ravindranath for being close friends and colleagues from the very beginning of this process. I would also like to thank all of the various members of the Dr. Cardona Happy Hour group: Augustin Speyer, Josef Fruewald, Aviad Eilam, Jonathan Gress-Wright, Ron Kim from time to time, whoever else I’ve forgotten, and especially Dr. Jean-Francois Mondon. Thank you to Tom McFadden for being my “buddy” upon arrival, and to Sandhya Sundaresan for being another great friend over the years. Also thanks goes to Mark Dredze for, among other things, helping me get a foot in the door of machine learning and computational linguistics more generally. I’d like to thank Theresa Biberauer and Ian Robert for a number of helpful conversations regarding the theoretical bent of this dissertation, and for much needed moral support at key moments. v Thank you to Arnold Zwicky and Paul Kiparsky, who have both been major influences on my linguistic thinking and good friends since my undergraduate days; long may it continue! I would like to thank my parents and the rest of my family for putting up with many emotional telephone calls during this process, and for general, unfailing support. I would also like to thank Lauren Hall-Lew and other members of the Dissertation Cops group for their extremely important emotional support during the period in which I was actually writing this thesis. Similarly, Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting has been an important support to me during the last two years of writing and various life-changes. Also, William Shakespeare for stress relief, and Sherlock Holmes, without whom I wouldn’t have started thinking about object shift in English. vi ABSTRACT ANTISYMMETRY AND THE CONSERVATION OF C-COMMAND: SCRAMBLING AND PHRASE STRUCTURE IN SYNCHRONIC AND DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVE Joel C. Wallenberg Supervisor: Anthony S. Kroch Holmberg’s Generalization (Holmberg 1986) was originally stated to describe the “object shift” phenomena found in the modern Scandinavian languages. This dissertation argues that object shift is merely a subcase of scrambling, a type of adjunction, and that Holmberg’s Generalization is a subcase of a universal constraint, the “Generalized Holmberg Constraint” (GHC), which prohibits leftward scrambling across c-commanding functional heads. The existence of such a constraint turns out to have ramifications far beyond the analysis of scrambling itself, and the predictions it makes ultimately form an extended argument in favor of a universal antisymmetric approach to phrase structure (Kayne 1994). The most important evidence for the GHC comes from diachronic
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