Richard Kayne

New York University | NYU · Department of Linguistics

French hypercomplex inversion can be used as a probe into the question whether or not the language faculty countenances the existence of true expletive pronouns, i.e. pronouns that make no interpretive contribution of any kind. The conclusion is that there are no expletive pronouns (in any language) in the strict sense of the term.

NP-deletion is an instance of movement involving a silent or pronounced resumptive pronoun.

There are no mirror-image pairs of languages. This restriction on the otherwise vast set of possible languages must be accounted for, and puts boundary conditions on any theory of the human language faculty. There are implications for externalization and in the longer run for the evolution of the language faculty. Antisymmetric linear/temporal orde...

The Spanish counterpart of English go shows apparently suppletive forms as follows. The alternation between v-, f- and i- seems not to be phonological. We can call it 'suppletion' as long as we recognize that doing so leaves questions open that we need to try to answer. In this paper, I will focus on the forms in f-. A familiar way of talking about...

The term ‘suppletion’ is appropriate for went/*goed, but only if that term is taken to be an informal descriptive term that hides a rich set of phonological and morphosyntactic properties that underlie each of went and *goed taken separately. No direct blocking relation between went and *goed is called for. The notion of verbal theme vowel is centr...

Sentences with the verb exist and with a lexical DP in subject position show no definiteness effect. This suggests that the definiteness effect is keyed in English to the presence of expletive there . More strongly put, a definiteness effect is invariably found whenever expletive there (or a counterpart of it in other languages, whether pronounced...

The Italian pair *il luo libro vs. il suo libro (‘the his/her book’) that is typical of Romance lends itself to an account of the first in terms of constraints also seen in the syntax of compounding, and to an account of the second that links its s -, despite initial appearances, to what we think of as Romance reflexive s -. We might informally cal...

One and ones are complex determiners whose relation to their antecedent, when they have one, is mediated by a silent noun. They are never themselves nouns taking an antecedent directly. All instances of non-numeral one are associated with a classifier, plus an indefinite article. Numeral one is in addition associated with an element akin to single....

On the basis of considerations involving complementizers, sentence-final particles, need, aspect, tense, focus and topic, agreement morphemes, determiners, verbrelated particles and adpositions, I reach the conclusion that many more heads in the sentential projection line (and elsewhere) must be taken to be silent than is usually thought. I then ar...

The study of English once and twice yields evidence that each of them is actually a complex phrase containing two visible morphemes and one silent one. Neither is a simple lexical item. The -ce morpheme is akin to a postposition, despite English being primarily prepositional. The silent element associated with once and twice is a silent counterpart...

The papers in this collection all deal with the concept of locality in syntactic theory and more specifically relate to the various contributions Luigi Rizzi has made in this connection over the past three and a half decades. The authors are all either former students of Rizzi’s or colleagues and friends who have collaborated with him closely over...

Comparative syntax in all its range can be seen as a window on the language faculty that is just beginning to bear fruit. Although comparative syntax is interested in delineating the parameters that underlie cross-linguistic syntactic differences, the primary importance of comparative syntax lies in the fact that it provides us with new kinds of ev...

A survey of a number of the world's languages reveals that only those languages that have a transitive verb used to express possession (i. e., Have-languages) also have a transitive verb 'need'. No Be-language lacking a transitive verb for possession has a transitive verb 'need'. This generalization suggests a Hale and Keyser (1993, 2002)-style inc...

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Syntax serves two functions: it will provide a general and theoretical introduction to comparative syntax, its methodology, and its relation to other domains of linguistic inquiry; and it will provide a systematic selection of the best comparative work available on those language groups and families where substant...

This chapter examines French cases of hyper-inversion in interrogative clauses. It assumes that the doubling of two clitics is possible and that an object and a subject clitic can start out as a single constituent in the clause. This assumption has potentially far-reaching consequences for the analysis of clitic elements and more generally for the...

A survey of a number of the world's languages reveals that only those languages that have a transitive verb used to express possession (i.e., Have-languages) also have a transitive verb ‘need’. No Be-language lacking a transitive verb for possession has a transitive verb ‘need’. This generalization suggests a Hale and Keyser (1993, 2002)–style inco...

This article provides background information on comparative syntax, focusing on the English and French languages. It evaluates the hypothesis that syntactic parameters are invariably features of functional elements and explains the concepts of microcomparative syntax and microparameters. The article investigates the number of parameters per functio...

Contains report on one research project.

The noun-verb distinction may not be a primitive property of the language faculty, but may rather be underlain by antisymmetry/antioptionality. The execution of this idea as developed here leads to the characterization of nouns as having neither complements nor specifiers. That in turn leads to the conclusion that the fact that..., derived nominals...

In order to account for morphosyntactic microvariation, an approach based on silent elements provides an alternative (one that is more tightly tied to other aspects of syntax) to an approach based on syncretism: languages are not more or less syncretic, they just happen to have a certain distribution of empty morphemes. This chapter analyses cases...

There is no auxiliary selection rule. ‘Have’ is identical to ‘be’ but for the incorporation of an abstract preposition (cf. Freeze (1992). The alternation is to be understood largely in terms of properties of the participial clause complement-whether it is full or reduced, whether AGR-S raises or not, whether Spec, AGR-O is moved through or not, ho...

This chapter examines parametric variation within the nominal domain and shows that crosslinguistic variation across a variety of nominal constructions can be linked to a single parameter: the presence versus absence of an overt determiner in French versus Italian. Drawing on the determiner phrase hypothesis and remnant movement, it compares three...

This chapter argues that the antecedent-pronoun relation must involve a movement relation, in a way partially similar to that stated in a recent work by John O'Neil and Norbert Hornstein. Taking this position to the extreme leads to the conclusion that accidental coreference in the sense explained by Howard Lasnik has a much narrower part to play i...

As noted by Jespersen (1970, 106), English few takes comparative and superlative suffixes: (1) John has fewer books than Bill. (2) John has the fewest books of anybody I know. in a way that makes it natural to take few to be an adjective. Few also patterns with adjectives in the way it takes degree modifiers: (3) John is too rich. (4) John has too...

This book presents a collection of recent articles by Richard Kayne, one of the top formal linguists in the world. It focuses on both comparative syntax, which uses differences between languages as a new and fine-grained tool for illuminating properties of the human language faculty, and antisymmetry, a restrictive proposal concerning the set of st...

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics. Thesis. 1969. Ph.D. Vita. Bibliography: leaves 195-198. Ph.D.

This chapter explores unpronounced elements in the context of a discussion of the English words few, little, many, much, and numerous. As is well known, few has regular comparative and superlative forms that make it natural to take the word as an adjective. Given this, the general parallelism between few and little, many, and much, combined with th...

This chapter investigates the syntax of expressions of age and time. English sentences like At the age of seven, John... and it's already past six are argued to contain unpronounced YEAR(S) and unpronounced HOUR(S), respectively. Differences in this area of syntax between English and French or Italian may, in the spirit of comparative syntax work,...

This chapter studies various instances of the word there using comparative syntax, and argues that there is not itself intrinsically locative. In its locative uses, there occurs concurrently with an unpronounced noun PLACE (which is locative). Then (apparently) locative there can be assimilated to the evidently non-locative there of (archaic Englis...

This chapter examines the question of prepositions, pursuing the argument in favor of an above-verb phrase (VP) source for some of them. Certain quantifier movements must then be reanalyzed as instances of remnant movement, as had been suggested for some cases in earlier work by Antonia Androutsopoulou and Michal Starke. This chapter contains, in a...

This chapter discusses agreement (between subject and verb), focusing on the important role of a silent auxiliary in a certain nonstandard English construction first discussed by John Kimball and Judith Aissen. Heavy-noun phrase (NP) Shift from the leftward movement perspective introduced by Richard Larson and developed further by Marcel den Dikken...

This chapter discusses comparative syntax and the parameters underlying some very fine-grained differences (in the area of quantity words) between English and French. One type of parameter proposed involves the choice between pronouncing and leaving silent a particular functional element. Comparative syntax necessarily involves work on more than on...

This chapter explores the debate concerning leftward versus rightward movements in the context of a proposal by James McCloskey concerning Irish. It is argued that, by bringing in considerations from Amharic and from certain English focus constructions, McCloskey's Irish data are compatible with a theory of universal grammar (UG) in which no rightw...

This chapter discusses microcomparative syntax in the form of a review of a 1994 collection of essays by Paola Benincà, whose work has shown how Italian dialect syntax can provide an invaluable window on aspects of universal grammar (UG) that might have gone unnoticed in work restricted to the best-known Romance languages. Although the discussion i...

This chapter explores the relation between prepositions and movement, arguing that in at least some cases - in particular, in causatives - what is considered as the argument of a preposition comes together with it as the result of movement (or internal Merge), not as the result of external Merge. The prepositions in question are introduced above ve...

This paper focusses on certain aspects of the antisymmetry hypothesis of Kayne (1994) and their implications for Japanese. The relation between S-H-C and the question of OV/VO order is discussed. The solidity of the antisymmetry hypothesis is enhanced by some previously undiscussed cross-linguistic gaps, i.e. imaginable language types that appear n...

In a number of cases (involving, e.g., negation, only, reverse scope of some and every, ACD) where covert (LF) phrasal movement has been postulated, it is possible and advantageous to dispense with covert movement (including feature raising) and replace it with a combination of overt movements of phonetically realized phrases. The strongest interpr...

The article shows that, in spite of their DP-internal appearance, many instances of the English preposition of and of the French preposition de can be reanalyzed as being VP-external. Moreover, it is argued that what looks like movement of a bare quantifier turns out to be remnant movement. It is also claimed that each +N subpart of DP must get its...

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Based on data concerning agreement and floated quantifiers from standard English and two non-standard variants, various generalizations are drawn as to when and how the functional head Num is spelled out.

In earlier work,1 we proposed that the contrast between French and Italian seen in the clitic climbing construction in (1) should be related to the contrast between them seen in (2) concerning null subjects: