Nordlyd

The Final-over-Final Condition

Waltraud Paul — 2024-12-31

The Final-over-Final Condition (FOFC) (Sheehan, Biberauer, Roberts, and Holmberg 2017) purports to be a universal word order constraint. In this article, we challenge this claim and demonstrate that the FOFC is of a statistical nature: It is a relativized¸ non-absolute version of cross-categorial harmony, where only a head-final projection dominating a head-initial projection is ruled out among the disharmonic configurations displaying different head directionalities. The cross-categorial generalizations in the World Atlas of Languages, referred to by Sheehan et al. (2017) in order to illustrate the crosslinguistic validity of the FOFC, are shown to be useless for determining head-directionality, given that they systematically gloss over functional categories. The Mandarin Chinese head-final split CP dominating a uniformly head-initial extended verbal projection and TP serves as a case study here, because it has challenged the FOFC since its very beginning. The numerous efforts to make the Chinese CP “FOFC-compliant”, the latest being Biberauer (2017), are shown to be unsuccessful and to ignore well-established principles of Chinese syntax. The data from Chinese thus add to the evidence from other languages likewise undermining the FOFC.

On Projecting Causality

Wei-Tien Dylan Tsai — 2024-12-31

Causation is familiar as a meaning component in the V-domain, but it can also be found in the C-domain, as witnessed by a variety of wh-adverbial, reflexive adverbial and light verb construals in Mandarin. This paper explores the idea that a loosely organized hierarchy of causality can be stretched from the first phase (i.e., the V-domain) up to the second phase (i.e., the C-domain) along the clausal spine according to the analyticity setting of Chinese. It is shown that all the causality construals under investigation here displays a systematic correspondence between their distributions and interpretations in cartographic terms. We also draw on evidence from non-canonical usages of how-expressions across languages to demonstrate that the “height of interpretation” does matter at the syntax-semantics interface.

Coordinators and modification markers as categoryless functional elements

Ning Zhang — 2024-12-31

A coordinate construction is built by two basic levels of combination: a categoryless functional head is combined with a conjunct, and the result is combined with a categorizer, which is the other conjunct. The first combination is seen in all structures headed by a functional element, and the latter is seen in the categorization of a root. The same two levels of combination are also seen in a modification construction. A categoryless functional head is realized by a coordinator or a modification marker. The positions of the low and high conjunct are also those of a modifier and the modified element, respectively. Thus, neither a coordinate construction nor a modification construction has a construction-specific structural representation or functional head. This means that no coordinate construction is built by any construction-specific operation and there is no stipulated Adjunction operation. The categoryless functional head can also be found in compounds, which can also be categoryless, like single roots

Stack-Sorting Grammar

David P. Medeiros — 2024-12-31

I propose that, within local domains corresponding to extended projections, typologically possible information-neutral word orders are limited to the stack-sortable (231-avoiding) permutations of a universal head-complement-specifier linear order. This proposal explains and unifies some well-known but previously unrelated word order universals, while successfully generating phenomena that challenge traditional approaches. Applications include Cinque’s revision of Greenberg’s Universal 20, the Final-Over-Final Condition, a modified Head Movement Constraint allowing attested Long Head Movement, English Affix Hopping, Germanic cross-serial subject-verb dependencies, and Icelandic Stylistic Fronting. Extending the system to multiple extended projections requires stack-sorting in cycles, expanding the set of allowed orders.

Generativity, comparative grammar, and the syntax vs. the lexicon debates

Gillian Catriona Ramchand — 2024-12-31

Within linguistic theory, the division of labour between syntax and the lexicon has been a central issue for debate among different architectures of grammar, roughly corresponding to the distinction between memorization and rule governed aspects of language competence. In this article, I give some historical context for these debates, concluding that differences in architectural assumptions are only resolvable ultimately if we are willing to allow these implementational decisions to have consequences for (and make predictions concerning) human behaviours or mental processes. I proceed then to assess the psycholinguistic evidence concerning the lexicon and processing from the cognitive science literature, and offer a reassessment of what this means for the linguistic debates that have dominated discussions of the lexicon to this date. My conclusion will be that some of the comfortable dichotomies often relied on in these discussions are untenable and that some of the classical positions need to be reevaluated.

The Workspace as a source of hierarchy in extended projections

Peter Svenonius — 2024-12-31

Extended projections (EPs) in natural languages have several properties which have not yet been explained. (i) EPs conform to a Hierarchy of Projections (HoP), a crosslinguistically similar hierarchical arrangement of semantically grounded categories. (ii) Each token of an EP is linear, in the sense that it has a single dimension (with specifiers and adjuncts stripped out, it is a string). (iii) HoPs are rooted in a lexical category with conceptual content at the bottom, and a succession of functional elements above. I argue that these properties motivate a particular architecture of the workspaces in which sentences are constructed. I model the workspace as a Finite State Automaton (FSA) with a monotonicity property which underpins hierarchy. The FSA starts from a lexical category (cf. (iii)), `projecting' it into an EP. Transitions correspond to applications of Merge, and states are stages in the derivation. The sequence of states in a path from start to accepting state is a string, the EP (cf. (ii)). The HoP is then the entire FSA, arranged with the start at the bottom and the final state, the complete clause or noun phrase, at the top (cf. (i)).