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Studies in Linguistics Vol 6, 2013 Studies In Linguistics Vol 6, 2013 STiL Studies in Linguistics Special Issue on “Directionality of Phrase Structure Building” Edited by: Cristiano Chesi Studies in linguistics (Centro interdipartimentale di studi cognitivi sul linguaggio) ISSN 2281-3128 Correspondence can be addressed to: CISCL – Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi Cognitivi sul Linguaggio Dipartimento di Scienze della Comunicazione Complesso S. Niccolò, Via Roma, 56 I-53100 Siena, Italy or by email at: c.chesi unisi.it Contents Cristiano Chesi Introduction to directionality 7 Colin Phillips and Shevaun Lewis Derivational Order in Syntax: Evidence and Architectural Consequences 11 Ruth Kempson, Ronnie Cann, And Lutz Marten Treegrowth Dynamics 49 Ash Asudeh Directionality and the Production of Ungrammatical Sentences 83 Cristiano Chesi Do the ‘right’ move 107 Jieun Kiaer Why Left-to-Right Grammar? Evidence from Korean 139 Michael Brody Syntax and Symmetry 167 Introduction to directionality CRISTIANO CHESI NETS – IUSS Pavia [email protected] A grammar that uses (recursive) structure building operations is adequate if and only if it recognizes and generates nothing but interpretable, well-formed sentences that are part of the language that the grammar aims at characterizing. If structure building operations overgenerate by recognizing and generating sentences that are considered ungrammatical by native speakers of the language under analysis, some relevant constraint should be added to the grammatical description. This necessity was clearly stated in Ross (1967), and its urgency was revealed by operations like Move α before (Lasnik and Saito 1992), then Merge, Move and Agree more recently (Chomsky 1995-2012): these operations are very general and simply too powerful. On the one hand, they might highlight important universal principles of human language structure, but, on the other, they require too many restrictions to meet, ultimately, the upper bound of the relevant linguistic description. It is a matter of fact that these operations are often defined in such a way to be practically insufficient to circumscribe many relevant empirical facts. Furthermore, common constraints (e.g. binary merge, locality or derivation by phase...) that have been proposed to limit the generative power of grammars are not explicitly related to notions of complexity or simplicity in any explicit computational sense. For instance, neither time or space complexity measures are fully taken into consideration nor a formalization of the problem space is provided (cf. Barton et al. 1987); in the end, what might seem a simpler structure building operation lead to rather complex restrictions in order to attain to empirical (descriptive) adequacy. In this special issue, nine authors investigated the empirical fit of “simpler” grammatical theories, discussing how certain restrictions on structure building procedures, or different formulations of them, lead to theories that are more descriptively and explanatory adequate. This is done in this volume by mainly focusing on how linear constraints restrict, or are restricted by, the hierarchical structure that is built incrementally. In this vein, the arguments presented in this volume discuss explicit formalizations of grammars that are largely derivational and directional: derivational since constituents and dependencies are built dynamically, piecemeal, using structure building operations like Merge, Move (Minimalism, Chomsky 1995), or update (Dynamic Syntax, DS, Cann et al. 2005), or monotonic integration of subsequent fragments, (Lexical Functional Grammar, LFG, Bresnan 2001); directional, since structure building operates strictly from left to right as proposed by Colin Phillips (1996, 2003, Phillips and Lewis in this volume, Kempson, Cann, Marteen, and Kiaer in this volume) and top-down (Chesi 2004, 2012, Chesi, Asudeh, and Brody in this volume) Vs. bottom-to-top (Chomsky 1995). © Copyright 2013 Cristiano Chesi STIL – Studies in Linguistics. 6:7-10 Special Issue on “Directionality of Phrase Structure Building” ISSN: 2281-3128 Introduction to directionality Cristiano Chesi The evidence discussed here is both formal and empirical and it is mostly related to a revised definition of derivation, explicitly addressing foundational issues, like the opportunity of such directionality specification as related to some constrained relation between hierarchical and linear (temporal) order (cf. Kayne 1994), or the necessity of a phase-based (chunked) incremental derivation. These considerations brought attention to empirical data that go beyond the classic performance and competence divide: in which (formal) sense parsing and competence are related? Is it really useful to assume that the grammar specification is really “implementation independent”? Colin Phillips and Shevaun Lewis (“Derivational Order in Syntax: Evidence and Architectural Consequences”), for instance, argue in favor of a grammatical theory that should be “implementation dependent”: the grammar should operate incrementally, building phrase structures consistently as real-time processing tasks (comprehension and production) demand, namely, roughly “from left to right”. In their lucid review, three main positions, relating the standard bottom-to-top (Minimalist) approach with the mental reality of the grammar are discussed: the literalist one (“bottom-to-top 'cyclic' derivations may be understood as literal descriptions of sequences of mental operations that speakers may, in principle, carry out”), the formalist (“the sequence of steps in a grammatical derivation may be understood not as a temporal ordering of structure-building operations, but rather as a formal relation between a set of structural representations”) and the extentionalist one (“a grammar is merely an abstract characterization of a function whose extension is all and only the well-formed sentences of a given language”) eventually arguing against the elusive nature of the third, widely spread, position. In the end, this paper argues in favor of a closer correspondence between grammatical derivations and the mental processes involved in producing or understanding sentences in real time: this conclusion supports a Left-Right derivational model (Phillips 1996) and, despite apparent problematic empirical issues, is both psycholinguistically tenable and empirically superior. This is also the conclusion reached by Ruth Kempson, Ronnie Cann and Lutz Marten (“Treegrowth dynamics”). In their paper, these authors provide evidence in favor of a novel grammar formalism (DS), that models natural languages as mechanisms for incrementally building up context-relative semantic representations following the dynamics of the parse process. The point of departure for this framework is to take the concepts of underspecification and update which are familiar in pragmatics and semantics, and extend them to syntax. Some empirical evidence comes from ordering effects (e.g. scrambling). Their work, here, focus on how the morphological puzzle of the rigid relative ordering of clitic pronouns in the Romance languages (Person Case Constraint, PCC) could be explained as a lexical calcification of scrambling mechanisms, as a frozen set of reflexes of what had been freely available in earlier stages of the language under analysis. Within a different formal framework (Lexical Functional Grammar), Ash Asudeh (“Directionality and the production of ungrammatical sentences”) embraces a similar directionality perspective. Focusing on production contexts in which sentences that are considered “ungrammatical” are commonly produced, a clear asymmetry emerges suggesting the superiority of a Top-Down derivation. This is the case of resumptive pronouns in certain structures: some English speakers produce resumptive pronouns 8 STIL – Studies in Linguistics Vol.6 2013 under certain circumstances, yet reject sentences containing resumptives as ungrammatical. Here Asudeh argues in favor of a language production model that explains this puzzle by assuming that the sentence derivation is incremental and prioritizes local well-formedness over global well-formedness. This has implication also for the directionality of the derivational process: in English resumptive in islands imply that the unbounded dependencies in grammar are filler-driven, featurally defined at the top of the dependency, and that islands are identifiable by the grammar from outside the island, in a top-down fashion (this perspective is also shared with Chesi in this volume). The intuition is formalized within the LFG framework by implementing a production model which is incremental and based on monotonic information growth. LFG provides a formal, ‘outside-in’ theory of unbounded dependencies that treats them as filler-driven and allows island barriers to be identified from outside of the island, rather than from the inside. Outside-in uncertainty presents a theoretically and empirically attractive alternative which has no clear analogue in other standard minimalist theories. Asudeh effectively pursues the outside-in (top-down, left-to-right) approach, presenting some of its theoretical and empirical virtues, and assessing certain challenges that have previously been thought to argue for an inside-out account (e.g. minimalism). Cristiano Chesi (“do the ‘right’ move”) as well, reaches the same conclusion looking at the basic “filters” commonly operating on free-merge: a major restriction, such as categorial selection, logically leads to a derivation that proceeds Top-Down; if selection is
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