The Emergence of Order in Syntax

The Emergence of Order in Syntax Jordi Fortuny Andreu Departament de Lingüística General Universitat de Barcelona Programa de Ciència Cognitiva i Llenguatge Bienni 2001-2003 Signatura de l’autor ___________________________________ Director ________________________________________________ Jaume Solà i Pujols Departament de Filologia Catalana Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Prologue The main idea of this study can be expressed in very few words: the syntactic component of the Faculty of Language is responsible for ordering categories and for ordering categories only. This would be a completely uninteresting thought, a truism, if one did not attempt to account for how and why the attested patterns emerge from the external requirements that the syntactic component has to satisfy. Although saying that syntax is responsible for order does no more than to express the etymological meaning of the word ‘syntax’, the use of the term ‘order’ in this study may deserve some attention, since it does not subscribe to the common use in grammatical studies. Throughout the text, the term ‘order’ does not exclusively refer to the literal precedence relation among terminals (this is the common use of the term in grammar), but rather to the hierarchical properties that are attributed to syntactic representations, as will later become clear. Literal precedence is mapped from hierarchy. Thus, the object of inquiry of the discipline called syntax is how categories are ordered or how hierarchies are generated. More precisely, this study poses two questions: what are the basic elements of the syntactic component? and why do syntactic patterns have the shape they seem to have? The first question is addressed in Part I and the second question in Part II. Part III summarizes the conclusions of the preceding two parts and discusses the possibility that Universal Grammar (Chomsky’s Factor II) is a rewiring of elements that are in place independently (Chomsky’s Factor III). Chapter 1 suggests that the basic elements of the syntactic component are features and a combinatorial operation known as Merge. A feature is defined as an instruction for a particular level of interpretation of the Faculty of Language and Merge is defined as an operation that takes as input two categories or sets and yields as output the union of these two sets. The specific instructions that functional categories provide for the several levels of interpretation are described. It is argued that the hierarchical properties of syntactic objects derive from a derivational record, a set K (a nest) where the outputs of Merge operations are linearly ordered by the strict inclusion relation. Consequently, Kayne’s Linear Correspondence Axiom is no longer an axiom one needs to postulate to account for the X’- theory; hierarchy is a product of creating structure successively and keeping the derivational information in a record. Applications of both internal and external Merge have been argued to be triggered by the requirement of matching [+type] categories and [+token] categories, without postulating any special device for the property of displacement; it has also been argued that suicidal greed, a device postulated to account for movement specifically, shows up three problems: the problem of generality, the problem of determinacy and the problem of consistency. 1 Part II (chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5) discusses the particular shape of syntactic objects by considering how syntactic derivations carried out by Merge are triggered by the morpholexical characterization of lexical items (clusters of features) and constrained by the Full Interpretation semantic legibility condition and by the Maximize Matching Effects principle of structural minimization. I argue that there are three types of syntactic patterns: discontinuous, analytic and syncretic. That is, it is possible for a feature to be assigned to two projections, for there to be a one-to- one relation between features and projections, and for more than one feature to be assigned to one projection. Thus the terms ‘discontinuous’, ‘analytic’ and ‘syncretic’ are relative to how features are associated with projections, or to how features are coded in the spine of a tree. It may be worth stressing that the use of the terms ‘analytic’ and ‘syncretic’ in this study differs from the use of the terms ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’ in morphological typology, which are relative to how features are associated with words. This is also true for the term ‘discontinuous’, commonly relative to the morpholexical level. In a very illuminating work I became aware of a few days before writing this prologue, Huang (2005a, b, 2006) explores the idea that multiple parameters such as the head-parameter, the pro-drop parameter, the wh- parameter, the telicity parameter and the configurationality parameter may derive from the distinction between analytic and synthetic languages in the abovementioned traditional sense, a distinction that Huang conceives in terms of an analytic vs. synthetic macro-parameter. Chapter 2 illustrates the relationship between C and Infl. The so-called C-Infl link can be materialized in the following semantic and morphosyntactic properties and generalized to several Infl-like features such as ϕ-features, tense, mood, modality and negation. Property (I): complementizers can ‘replicate’ Infl-like features Property (II): there is a correlation between the characteristics of features surfacing on Infl and the choice of C Property (III): Infl-like features are involved in triggering V-to-C movement Chapter 3 discusses the source of the C-Infl link and concludes that C and Infl are polarities of the same feature ([±clause typing]) and that Infl-like features are assigned to both polarities, directly accounting for the three properties of the C-Infl link. The reason for this simultaneous insertion is that the semantic instruction provided by Infl-like features (to trigger referential displacement) is orthogonal to the [±clause typing] distinction. The ν-V link and the P-K link are also analyzed as two syntactic discontinuities. The proposal that C and Infl constitute a discontinuous syntactic object is preceded by a relatively intricate evaluation of a plausibility argument: Chomsky’s (2005b) Feature Inheritance Theory, a subcomponent of the theory of phases, which can be generalized to Infl-like features. Consider the Phase-Impenetrability Condition. 2 Phase-Impenetrability Condition (PIC) Consider a Phase PH = [α, [H, β]], H being the phase head Call α and H the edge of PH, and β the domain of H The domain of H is not accessible to syntactic operations beyond PH, only the edge, {α, H}, since Transfer sends β to C-I and A-P once H has terminated its work (adapted from Chomsky 2001b: 5-6). Briefly, if the characteristics of Infl-like features depend on the choice of C (semantic property II) and that Infl-like features can surface and be syntactically operative not only in Infl but also in C (morphosyntactic properties I and III), and it can be independently argued that there is an important asymmetry as to the role that C and T/Infl play in syntactic derivations, then it becomes interesting to consider the possibility that C, the head responsible for defining the relatively complete fragments of structure to be transferred from the syntactic workspace to the external systems, is precisely the locus where Infl-like features are base- generated, appearing only derivatively on Infl heads due to inheritance mechanisms. Consider the following sketch of the Generalized Feature Inheritance Theory, which is based on Chomsky’s recent insights. Generalized Feature Inheritance Theory (GFIT) (i) C has a central role in the generation of syntactic objects (ii) Infl does not have a central role in the generation of syntactic objects (iii) Infl-like features are generated on C (iv) In the lexicon, Infl lacks Infl-like features (v) Infl-like features surface on Infl only derivatively (vi) The feature inheritance mechanism has the function of bringing semantic distinctions into a syntactic representation As will be shown below, the classical empirical argument for strict cyclicity is no longer valid, due to parallel probing at the phase level. And after thoroughly revising the Phase- Impenetrability Condition, it must be concluded that it is both too weak and too strong. It is too weak because penetrating into the ege of H is as problematic as penetrating into the domain of H (as Chomsky’s refinement of Huang’s subject islands show) and because not only A’-movement but also A-movement is successive cyclic. It is too strong because probing into the domain of H is possible when there is no intervention effect, as in experiencer constructions in languages like Icelandic and Catalan. In order to account for subject islands, wh-islands and the requirement that both A’-movement and A-movement are successive cyclic, the Phase-Impenetrability Condition has been replaced by the Relativized Opacity Condition. 3 Relativized Opacity Principle In a syntactic object [α1P [α1 … [α2P ∆ [α2 Γ] ] ] ], where: (i) α1 and α2 are two probes of the same type α each projecting an aP (ii) ∆ is SPEC-α2 and Γ is α2-COMPL, and (iii) ∃δ: δ is a constituent of ∆ and ∃γ: γ is a constituent of Γ, α1 can probe ∆ or Γ if they provide a suitable token for α1, but it cannot readily probe γ or δ The factor that determines whether α1 can readily probe a goal is the relative depth of such a goal in the α2-projection whose label is of the same type as the searching probe α1. α2P does not render the complete ∆ and Γ opaque to α1 , but search in them becomes difficult. For this reason, long A-movement must use intermediate SPEC-Tdef as an escape hatch and long A’- movement must use intermediate SPEC-Cs and SPEC-νs to attain its final position. The source of subject islands and wh-islands is the same: a probe α fails to search too deep into the SPEC or the COMPL of a lower α-projection.

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