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The minimalist program

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... Tikas ini berada dalam satu rantaian yang sama dengan unsur anteseden/operator yang telah digerakkan. Dalam Program Minimalis yang dirangka secara eklektik daripada idea Chomsky (1995), Marantz (1995 dan Radford (2009). Gerak-α telah digugurkan. ...
... Kata kunci: Program Minimalis, rumus salin, fitur, ayat tanya wh-, ayat tanya ya-tidak Abstract Previous theories prior to the Minimalist Program, such as the Government Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981) and Principles and Parameters, the variation of sentence structures are explicated via the rule move-α, whereby it moves any constituents to any position in a sentence and leaves behind a trace (t) in its antecedent/operator-trace chain. Within the Minimalist Program approach, which was eclectically derived from the ideas in Chomsky (1995), Marantz (1995) and Radford (2009), the rule move-α has been dropped. Sentence generation and sentence varieties are generated via copying rules instead. ...
... Hal ini dikatakan demikian kerana tatabahasa kognitif mestilah mengaplikasikan operasi transformasi ayat melalui prinsip-prinsip mudah (Chomsky, 1995). Mengikut pandangan para peneliti pendekatan PM seperti Chomsky (1995), Marantz (1995), Ouhalla (1999), Haegeman (1999) dan Radford (2009), penjanaan ayat dan variasi ayat dapat ditangani melalui operasi rumus salin. Penelitian Radford (2009) terhadap operasi rumus salin bagi ayat bahasa Inggeris telah menunjukkan bahawa apabila Gerak-α digugurkan dalam pendekatan PM, ada mekanisme baharu dalam penjanaan ayat, iaitu operasi rumus salin. ...
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Dalam teori terdahulu sebelum Program Minimalis, iaitu teori Kuasaan dan Tambatan, dan Prinsip dan Parameter variasi ayat dijana oleh Gerak-α yang menggerakkan sesuatu konstituen ke mana-mana sahaja dengan meninggalkan tikas. Tikas ini berada dalam satu rantaian yang sama dengan unsur anteseden/operator yang telah digerakkan. Dalam Program Minimalis yang dirangka secara eklektik daripada idea Chomsky (1995), Marantz (1995) dan Radford (2009). Gerak-α telah digugurkan. Sebaliknya penjanaan ayat dan variasinya dijana melalui operasi rumus salin. Kajian ini menganalisis motivasi rumus salin dalam penjanaan ayat tanya wh- dan ayat ya-tidak bahasa Melayu. Kajian ini menggunakan kaedah kualitatif dan data kajian diperoleh melalui introspeksi. Data tersebut kemudiannya dirujuk kepada dua orang informan penutur jati bahasa Melayu untuk mengesahkan penerimaan atau penolakannya. Dapatan kajian ini mendapati bahawa fitur [+/-wh] dan fitur-fitur tepian; yakni [+/-komp], [+/-wh] [+/-fokus], dan [+/-in situ] merupakan fitur yang menjadi pemangkin atau penghalang dalam menjana ayat tanya wh- dan ya-tidak bahasa Melayu dan variasinya
... Kajian ini menggunakan pendekatan Program Minimalis secara eklektik yang terdapat dalam Chomsky (1995), Marantz (1995) dan Radford (2009). Pendekatan Program Minimalis memetakan ciri tatabahasa kognitif penutur natif sebagaimana perkembangan tipikal tatabahasa kanak-kanak yang diperolehnya dalam masa yang singkat; yakni dalam masa lima hingga enam tahun (Radford, 2009). ...
... Pendekatan ini mengandaikan bahawa tatabahasa semestinya mudah, kemas dan pasimony (Chomsky, 1995). Marantz (1995) Dengan berdasarkan Rajah 1, penjanaan ayat bermula dari bawah ke atas. Pengetahuan bahasa natif penutur diandaikan meliputi sifat khazanah kata (leksikon). ...
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Fungsi gramatis objek sering menimbulkan kekeliruan dalam kalangan pengguna bahasa Melayu walaupun penjelasan telah diberikan dalam buku tatabahasa pegangan, Tatabahasa Dewan. Bertitik tolak daripada isu kekeliruan objek, kajian ini bermatlamat untuk memberikan huraian secara teoretis tentang fungsi gramatis objek dalam ayat bahasa Melayu dengan meneliti perilaku sintaksis empat kata kerja, iaitu kata kerja “mencari”, “mencarikan”, “menderma” dan “mendermakan”. Penjelasan teoretis adalah berlandaskan Program Minimalis. Dari aspek metodologi, kajian ini menggunakan data korpus DBP dan korpus dibuat individu dengan yakin (DIY) daripada akhbar Berita Harian Online. Di samping itu, soal selidik juga dilakukan untuk memperoleh penilaian kebolehterimaan ayat berdasarkan intuisi penutur natif bahasa Melayu. Hasil kajian menunjukkan bahawa penutur natif bahasa Melayu menerima bahawa ayat “mencari” dan “menderma” mempunyai dua argumen yang berfungsi sebagai subjek dan objek langsung. Bagi kata kerja “mencarikan”, didapati bahawa penutur natif bahasa Melayu cenderung terhadap binaan dua objek yang diwakili oleh frasa nama. Walau bagaimanapun, dapatan kajian ini menunjukkan bahawa bagi kata kerja “mendermakan”, subjek kajian cenderung memilih binaan datif, iaitu FN+ kata kerja + FN + FP. Kajian ini berpendirian bahawa objek tak langsung dalam bahasa Melayu perlu diberikan pilihan, sama ada ada frasa nama atau frasa preposisi yang terdiri daripada kontruksi FN + FN atau FN + FP. Binaan datif ini selari dengan intuisi penutur natif dan justifikasi secara teoretis.
... In the Minimalist Programme, structures are formed through Numeration when lexical items are spilled into the working area for purposes of computation. Each lexical item has a bundle of features that identify it and dictate its usage patterns (Radford, 1988(Radford, , 1997Chomsky, 1995;Marantz, 1995;den Dikken, 2000). The formal features of person, number and gender, which are part of the grammatical features of a language, are often identified through the words in the lexicon (den Dikken, 2000). ...
... When they check, they are erased and the computation is said to converge. If not, the computation crashes (Marantz, 1995;Radford, 1997). ...
Article
This paper argues the case of linguistic relativity through a Vygotskyan socio-cultural perspective. A major tenet of Vygotskyan socio-cultural theory is that sign systems (e.g., language) are psychological tools, which after a period of internalization, result in a transformation of inner processing. The logical extension of Vygotskyan socio-cultural theory is that the internalization of different sign systems, such as Chinese logographic characters or English alphabetic script, should invariably result in the development of distinct types of inner processing. This argument is essentially one of linguistic relativity, or the idea that the nature of language itself can impact on cognitive processing. Evidence to support this argument is found in behavioural and neuroanatomical studies. Finally, some implications to ESL pedagogy are discussed within a relativist framework.
... We say this because the notion of markedness was abandoned to concentrate on parameters, and the latter, even if not abandoned, was relegated to give way to functional categories. Liceras (2004) discussed 'feature land', because 'features', together with 'interfaces', two defi ning constructs in the Minimalist Program (MP; Chomsky 1995, Marantz 1995, were about to occupy central stage in generative analyses of interlanguage grammars. Occupying a central stage does not mean rejecting the validity of other constructs. ...
... In the fi eld of language acquisition and bilingualism, a core issue of the MP that has somehow occupied the vacuum left by markedness is the concept of interfaces . Even though this has not meant 'the end of syntax' (Marantz 1995), the fact that interfaces occupy a central role has meant a revival of the disciplines associated with the two interfaces phonology and prosody, on the one hand, and semantics and pragmatics, on the other. In the MP, the language faculty has a computational system with lexical resources. ...
... Since case features can be verified at the argument's base position, an argument that is already in a case-marked position cannot be moved in order to verify its case features. According to Radford (1997), Marantz (1995) & Obiamalu (2015, such a movement will be selfish. It is also important to keep in mind that feature-checking drives the morphological features of movement operations. ...
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This study examines argument preposing in Ibibio, a Lower-Cross language spoken in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria, from its base-generated position to a case feature position and then to the left periphery of the sentence. It used the Minimalist Program (MP) as its theoretical model to explain the syntactic and semantic causes of argument preposing in overt syntax. According to the MP, sentence derivation is the process of combining meaning and sound while adhering to specific economic rules. Fifty-two sentences were elicited from fourteen native speakers in addition to the researchers' intuitive knowledge. Findings reveal that interrogative, topicalised, left-dislocated and cleft structures show evidence of argument preposing. The work establishes that Ibibio displays both the in-situ and non-in-situ patterns concerning the position of wh-operators. The preposing of the object wh-operators is obligatorily followed by a base-generated "ke'' focus marker. Topic arguments are probed by the ke particle. Left dislocation is characterised by an overt trace in the form of a resumptive pronoun. Clefting process also utilises the ké particle as a relativiser to introduce the clause that modifies the cleft argument in the language. Argument preposing in Ibibio is basically a strategy for focusing. Abstract in Ibibio Utom ami akese abaña daña eben anamñkpọ ke ntịppe itie amọ eka edem mbaak akenie anyʌñ abọ idiọñọ nte anamñkpọ ke usem Ibibio-ake Lowa Krọs, eesemme ke Akwa Ibom Sted. Naiyiria. Nduuñọ ami akeben awọt mme mbed usem ye se adiinam uben-anamñkpọ ñkaa edem ada anọ. Edeet utom ami ekeene akikere se isịne ke fremwọk Minimalis Prokram. Fremwọk ami abo ke enam usem ekeene ewuana ami mme uyo ikọ eniehe ye se mme udịm ikọ eda enọ ke ibio-ibio mbed. Udịm usem aba mme duob mme iba ke ekebọọ eto mme asem-usem dian ye ifiọk mbon JOLAN Volume 27.1&2, December 2024 26 nduuñọ ke ekama enam nduuñọ ami. Nduuñọ ami ayaara abo ke ubịp mbịmme, usio ikọ nnyan ke nsio-nsio usʌñ edo mme usʌñ ebenne anamñkpọ eka nwuọ-nda itie ke ubọk ufien ke usem. Utom ami amaana abo ke usem ami anie usʌñ iba ekemeke adiibịp mbịmme: Anye abịppe mbịmme ke ñkped-ñkped (in-situ) ye ada abọadinam akaañake akeda ke ubọk ufien adiwọt idiọñọ mbịmme. Utom ami ñko ate ke idioño uben anamñkpọ ñkaa edem asesaña ye ntịppe ikọ 'ke'. Ke ami anam uwak utom dian ye adiinọ ikọ nwuọ-nda ke usem. Anamñkpọ aseenie ndukpọñ ke ntak adiika edem. Adiiben anamñkpọ ñkaa edem ado usʌñ adiinọ ikọ nwuọ-nda ke usem Ibibio.
... Determiners are positioned universally at nominal places with abstract features and must be studied concerning their value (Brame, 1981;Maclaughlin, 1997;Tang, 1990). Demonstratives are also used as specifiers (Marantz, 1995;Rafael, 2016). ...
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The existence of determiner phrases and their different manifestations in number, gender, and case have been studied and proved in English in many research studies. Many languages other than English need this investigation to establish a sound hypothesis about the universal language structure. This study was an attempt to find out the structure of the determiner phrase in the Pashto. It also investigated the equivalents of the English determiner phrase in the Pashto. It used the spoken corpus of Pashto as primary data. In addition, short stories and novels written by literary writers in the Pashto have been used as secondary data. Moreover, intensive group discussion with native speakers of Pashto has also been utilized as another secondary data source. The minimalist program was used to guide and understand the syntactic structure of languages. It was followed by the determiner phrase hypothesis. The hypothesis states that a noun is headed by its determiner in a noun phrase. Data were analyzed within the framework of the determiner phrase hypothesis. The study shows that a noun in the determiner phrase is not determined by a definite or indefinite article in Pashto. The determiner phrase is inflected for number, gender, and case in Pashto. Furthermore, the Pashto determiner phrase is different from English in terms of medial demonstrative determiners. The study is significant as it provides insight into the structure of the Pashto determiner phrase.
... 5 With the view that in minimalism language acquisition is acquisition of features, there have been several calls that SLA studies, particularly those done within the generative approach, should be conducted at interfaces (see e.g. Marantz 1995;Chomsky 2005;Lardiere 2009). This is due to the fact that most of the difficulties encountered by L2 learners have been attributed to these interfaces, be they within syntax and its interfaces or within other modules and their interfaces. ...
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This study sets out to answer one major question: do linguistic phenomena relating to syntax-discourse interface constitute difficulty for Yemeni learners of English? It presents data from an experiment on the acquisition of L2 English wh- interrogatives by L1 Yemeni Arabic speakers, aiming to provide empirical evidence either in support of the Interface Hypothesis (IH) or against it. Two learner groups, intermediate and advanced, were recruited as participants of the study, and a native speaker group of (British) English was also recruited as the control group. The advanced group learners have a near-native proficiency in English. The data utilized consisted of 20 (D-)iscourse linked and non-d-linked wh- interrogatives presented to the three groups in the form of a (decontextualized) bi-modal multiple-choice paced judgement task. Results showed that both learner groups, specifically the advanced learners, performed near-native like in the non-d-linked, but far short of near/native-like performance in the d-linked wh- interrogatives. The study concluded that L2 learners’ English is still vulnerable at the syntax-discourse interface, hence supporting the IH.
... However, the debate in linguistics and cognitive science concerns where to put the divide between 'on the fly' construction and direct retrieval (Tremblay, 2012). Theories arguing for a primary role for composition (Chomsky, 1993;Marantz, 1995;Jackendoff, 2002;Szabó, 2004) assume that rules would be responsible for the 'on the fly' computation of regular forms, while the irregular ones have to be stored in the lexicon and retrieved as a whole. On the other hand, usage-based constructionist approaches consider frequency as a crucial factor and claim that frequent forms are stored in the lexicon, while the composition mechanism is reserved to infrequent ones (Goldberg, 2003;Bybee, 2006). ...
... At the point of convergence, the adjective àfìá 'white' moves to the left to occupy the specifier position. Marantz (1995) maintains that, the point called spell-out determines which movement will affect the pronunciation of a sentencethose that occur before spell-out and those that occur after spell-out on the way to LF. The assumption is that at some point within the LF, the rules of the grammar of the language must be interpreted correctly. ...
Chapter
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This chapter examines complements and heads in Ibibio (New Benue-Congo) nominal compounds including the syntactic and semantic bond between constituents of a nominal compound. It adopts the Minimalist Program (MP) of (Chomsky, The minimalist program. MIT Press, 1995) and conceptualizes on (Kayne, The antisymmetry of syntax. MIT Press, 1994) Linear Corresponding Axiom (LCA) which assumes that universal word ordering between a head and its dependent, to be Specifier-Head-Complement (S-H-C), and provides a unified account for the optimal and plausible nominal compounds in the language. Data were elicited from native speakers of Ibibio to form a list of compound words. This work postulates that nominal compounds are left-headed driven in the language. Analysis of the data reveals that in a noun plus noun compound, the first noun, which occurs at the left-periphery of the compound functions as the operator and heads the compound while the other noun, which occurs to the right assumes a complement function. It is also observed that in every noun-plus-noun construction there is a relative clause reduction mechanism (delete) in which what converges at the spell-out is the optimal constituent. For instance, the compound úfộk- ítìààd ‘block house’ is derived from úfộk ákè ítìààd, ‘the house that is made of blocks’. For adjective plus noun compounds, we argue that what is spelled out at both PF and LF interface levels undergoes some leftward movement of the adjective and a subsequent deletion of the relative clause in overt syntax. For instance, àbúbíd ébòd, ‘black goat’ is derived from the constituents ‘ébòd ádòohò àbúbíd ‘a goat that is black’, that actually entered the derivation at the computation stage. Also revealed is the interplay between syntax and semantics disclosing certain ordering of lexical items in which meanings can be altered. Even when the head of an exocentric compound does not subcategorize for its syntactic value, it is observed that the semantics of the left (head) noun predicts the overall meaning of the derived nominal compound.KeywordsComplementConvergenceEndocentricOperatorOptimal
... Što se tiče konkretnih lingvističkih istraživanja na materijalu srpskog jezika, pisanih na srpskom, toga nije bilo mnogo, osim nekoliko radova sa kraja 90-ih čiji su autori J. Moskovljević (1996Moskovljević ( , 1997 i S. Halupka (1999). 9 Sam srpski (i srpsko-hrvatski) jezik, međutim, nije nepoznat u novijoj generativnoj gramatici, uglavnom 8 Ovaj pregled uglavnom je baziran na sledećim knjigama i člancima: , Cook and Newman 1996, Maranz 1994, Chomsky 1994, Chomsky 1995, Radford 1997, Carnie 2002, Adger 2003, Radford 2004, Hornstein, Nunes and Grohmann 2005 Naš najznačajniji lingvista generativne provenijencije, Olga Mišeska Tomić, napisala je većinu knjiga i radova (uključujući i najnoviju, Mišeska Tomić 2004) na engleskom jeziku. zahvaljujući istraživanjima lingvista sa prostora bivše SFRJ koji žive i rade u SAD-u, kao što su prvenstveno Draga Zec, Željko Bošković (2001Bošković ( , 2002 i Ljiljana Progovac (1993Progovac ( , 1998, a i drugi, kao L. Zlatić (1997) i S. Stjepanović (1998). ...
Book
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The book FROM WORDS TO DISCOURSE contains eleven articles that address the broad topic of meaning in language on various levels – from words and concept formation, word combinations, the functional meaning of certain syntactic constructions in context and the syntax-pragmatics interface, the significance of contemporary linguistic theories and their application, to the general meaning of various language segments in situational and social contexts. Focusing on the English language and often contrasting it with the Serbian language, the book exploits a wide theoretical background of several linguistic disciplines (syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, contrastive analysis) and uses them to examine various language-use related issues.
... This argument is in fact extensible to all the PP constructions in (16-22). Let us therefore make a distinction between the "genuine" Genitive (8)(9)(10)(11) and the "pseudo" Genitive constructions in (16-22) and (38). We however, treat both types as inherent and therefore do not subject them for checking. ...
... The first assumption comes from what is called "the minimalist program" (MP). The MP is the latest development that continues the trend in generative grammar that began with Chomsky (Marantz, 1995). Generative grammar considers that natural language syntax is expressible by grammatical models endowed with recursive procedures, since natural languages involve recursive generative functions (Chomsky, 2002). ...
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Desde la bioloinguistica, ensamble sería una operación digital realizada en el cerebro que, en tanto tal, estaría asociada a principios específicos de la computación neural. En una primera aproximación, la computación digital consiste en el procesamiento de cadenas de dígitos de acuerdo a reglas generales. Sin embargo, los procesos neurales no se desarrollarían de acuerdo a los principios de la computación digital. Estas afirmaciones en conflicto, e.g., la caracterización digital de ensamble y la caracterización no digital del cerebro, llevan al siguiente escenario: o bien ensamble es una operación que no realiza el cerebro, o bien es realizada por el cerebro pero no digitalmente. El propósito de este artículo es evaluar los problemas de estas dos tesis.
... economic energy-saving principle in minimalism referred to as Shortest Move. An illustrative example is that of Marantz (1995) shown in (5): (5) a.*Have John will t left by the time we get there? b. *What did you persuade who to buy t? ...
... The minimalist program (henceforth, minimalism; see Chomsky, 1995bChomsky, , 2016Marantz, 1995;Belletti and Rizzi, 2002;Boeckx, 2006;Hornstein, 2009;Berwick and Chomsky, 2016) 1 developed out of the Principles and Parameters approach to syntax. Minimalism explores the idea that the basic operations of the human language faculty are simple and few, and that the attested complexities of natural language (such as unbounded dependencies) are a byproduct of the interactions of subsystems. ...
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Work within the minimalist program attempts to meet the criterion of evolvability: “any mechanisms and primitives ascribed to UG rather than derived from independent factors must plausibly have emerged in what appears to have been a unique and relatively sudden event on the evolutionary timescale” (Chomsky et al., 2017). On minimalist assumptions the evolution of the language faculty must have involved at least three major developments: (i) the evolution of computational atoms, lexical items, understood as bundles of features, (ii) the evolution of a single, simple recursive operation that glues together lexical items and complexes of lexical items, and (iii) externalization linking the syntactic component of the language faculty to the cognitive systems that humans use for sound and gesture. The first development, the evolution of lexical items and the lexicon, is especially poorly understood. A complete account of the evolution of lexical items will state what evolved, how, and why. The focus of this article is the first question: what evolved. What properties do lexical items have, what determines these properties, and what is the internal structure of lexical entries? The article identifies what the key open problems are for a minimalist account of the evolution of words that strives to meet the criterion of evolvability.
... This is perhaps why Chomsky (1995b:334-340) devotes a section to word order while claiming, in the same breath, that there is no clear evidence that word order plays a role in the computation of human language (Chomsky, 1995b:334). Similarly, Hornstein, Nunes and Grohmann (2005), in one of the best (known) introductions to MP, dedicate as much as a whole chapter to linearization, when they, in common with Chomsky (1995b) and Marantz (1995), are of the view that linearization is essentially phonology. ...
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This article argues that the theoretical desiderata of Minimalist Program (MP) will actually necessitate, or even force, a high level of sensitivity to cross-linguistic structural variation, at least higher than has been the case in Principles and Parameters Theory. Moreover, this heightened sensitivity to cross-linguistic variation is likely to call into question two fundamental assumptions in Generative Grammar (GG), namely the distinction between competence and performance as well as the objection to the inclusion of performance in linguistic theory. By drawing on word order and, to a lesser extent, case marking (also related ultimately to linearization) for purposes of illustration, the article will explain how GG, as reconfigured in MP, needs Linguistic Typology more than ever, as MP theorists are becoming increasingly aware of the relevance of cross-linguistic variation to their minimalist inquiry. Furthermore, functional motivations or explanations (e.g. performance), typically utilized in LT, are likely to resonate well with the minimalist focus on so-called interface conditions.
... Cf. e.g. Chomsky (1995, 2000, 2005a, 2005b;Hornstein (2009);Hornstein, Nunes and Grohmann (2005);Marantz (1995);Radford (2009). ...
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The phenomenon of left dislocation (LD) has received relatively little attention in the generative literature. In Government & Binding theory and early versions of Minimalist Syntax, the left-dislocated expression is conventionally taken to be base-generated in its sentence-initial surface position and the resumptive pronoun in some other position in the structure. The establishment of an (obligatory) coreferential relationship between these expressions is usually ascribed to a special binding mechanism, A-bar binding, though this issue is seldom explicitly addressed in LD studies. The aim of this paper is to present, in broad outline, an alternative analysis of LD constructions, one that incorporates the core hypotheses of the nominal shell analysis of coreferential constructions put forward by Oosthuizen (2013a,b). On this analysis, the resumptive pronoun and the referring expression that is to serve as its antecedent are base-generated in a nominal shell structure which is headed by a presentational focus light noun, a functional category belonging to a natural class of identificational elements. The coreferential relationship between the two expressions is established within this structure by means of phi-feature valuation. The antecedent is subsequently raised into the left-periphery of the sentence, where it surfaces as the left-dislocated expression. It is claimed that such an analysis can account for the phenomenon of obligatory coreferentiality in LD constructions in terms of formal devices that are either already provided by or compatible with the basic assumptions and concepts of Minimalist Syntax. A tentative proposal is also put forward to account for the word order in LD constructions, specifically for the fact that left-dislocation does not bring about (surface) subject-verb inversion in V2 languages such as Afrikaans.
... The operational zone containing an unlimited number of lexical units. All combinations must occur in the working prior Spell Out (SeeChomsky (1995), Marantz, (1995 and Chomsky, (2002) for a detailed of exposition of the Minimalist Program). pst non-prog burrn slap on child woman jaw 'B rka slapped a girl on the aw' (B rka burnt a slap on a girl's aw). ...
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The Lamnsoꞌ verb dezə̀v ‘beat/slap’ has many synonyms. The native speaker selects from the plethora of these synonymous verbs the variant that best meets his/her conceptual and intentional requirements for a complete interpretation of an event. This paper examines the role of synonymy in the specification of event impact and agent intent. Following Yuka, (2008), the paper investigates the function of verbal extensions within the Lamnsoꞌ verbal system. It reveals that when verbal extensions are affixed to synonyms of the Lamnsoꞌ verb dzə̀v, these extensions restrict event and argument distribution. The paper is cast within Chomsky’s (1992, 1995 and 2002) minimalist conceptions. Part of our interest in this paper is to determine how Chomsky’s definition of ‘economy of derivation’ accommodates the duplicity of lexical items that yield the same semantic value; it sets out to verify whether there are absolute synonyms in any natural language and whether the concept of ‘economy’ (as in Chomsky 1992, 1995 and 2000) is not a poor interpretation Katz (1972:18) Principle of Effability.
... . The architecture, therefore, closely approximates what Marantz (1995) referred to as the "end of syntax." ...
Chapter
The Minimalist Program has advanced a research program that builds the design of human language from conceptual necessity. Seminal proposals by Frampton & Gutmann (1999, 2000, 2002) introduced the notion that an ideal syntactic theory should be ‘crash-proof’. Such a version of the Minimalist Program (or any other linguistic theory) would not permit syntactic operations to produce structures that ‘crash’. There have, however, been some recent developments in Minimalism – especially those that approach linguistic theory from a biolinguistic perspective (cf. Chomsky 2005 et seq.) – that have called the pursuit of a ‘crash-proof grammar’ into serious question. The papers in this volume take on the daunting challenge of defining exactly what a ‘crash’ is and what a ‘crash-proof grammar’ would look like, and of investigating whether or not the pursuit of a ‘crash-proof grammar’ is biolinguistically appealing.
... There are three main avenues of linguistics research that address this problem: nativism (e.g. Chomsky, 1965Chomsky, , 1982Marantz, 1995;Grimshaw, 1997), functionalism (e.g. Greenberg, 1963;Bybee, 1985;Cutler et al., 1985;Du Bois, 1987;Comrie, 1989;Croft, 2003), and cultural evolution via iterated learning (e.g. ...
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Cultural artifacts, such as language, survive and replicate by passing from mind to mind. Cultural evolution always proceeds by an inductive process, where behaviors are never directly copied, but reverse engineered by the cognitive mechanisms involved in learning and production. I will refer to this type of evolutionary change as inductive evolution and explain how this represents a broader class of evolutionary processes that can include both neutral and selective evolution. This thesis takes a mechanistic approach to understanding the forces of evolution underlying change in culture over time, where the mechanisms of change are sought within human cognition. I define culture as anything that replicates by passing through a cognitive system and take language as a premier example of culture, because of the wealth of knowledge about linguistic behaviors (external language) and its cognitive processing mechanisms (internal language). Mainstream cultural evolution theories related to social learning and social transmission of information define culture ideationally, as the subset of socially-acquired information in cognition that affects behaviors. Their goal is to explain behaviors with culture and avoid circularity by defining behaviors as markedly not part of culture. I take a reductionistic approach and argue that all there is to culture is brain states and behaviors, and further, that a complete explanation of the forces of cultural change can not be explained by a subset of cognition related to social learning, but necessarily involves domain-general mechanisms, because cognition is an integrated system. Such an approach should decompose culture into its constituent parts and explore 1) how brains states effect behavior, 2) how behavior effects brain states, and 3) how brain states and behaviors change over time when they are linked up in a process of cultural transmission, where one person's behavior is the input to another. I conduct several psychological experiments on frequency learning with adult learners and describe the behavioral biases that alter the frequencies of linguistic variants over time. I also fit probabilistic models of cognition to participant data to understand the inductive biases at play during linguistic frequency learning. Using these inductive and behavioral biases, I infer a Markov model over my empirical data to extrapolate participants' behavior forward in cultural evolutionary time and determine equivalences (and divergences) between inductive evolution and standard models from population genetics. As a key divergence point, I introduce the concept of non-binomial cultural drift, argue that this is a rampant form of neutral evolution in culture, and empirically demonstrate that probability matching is one such inductive mechanism that results in non-binomial cultural drift. I argue further that all inductive problems involving representativeness are potential drivers of neutral evolution unique to cultural systems. I also explore deviations from probability matching and describe non-neutral evolution due to inductive regularization biases in a linguistic and non-linguistic domain. Here, I offer a new take on an old debate about the domain-specificity vs -generality of the cognitive mechanisms involved in language processing, and show that the evolution of regularity in language cannot be predicted in isolation from the general cognitive mechanisms involved in frequency learning. Using my empirical data on regularization vs probability matching, I demonstrate how the use of appropriate non-binomial null hypotheses offers us greater precision in determining the strength of selective forces in cultural evolution.
... Other arguments, however, assume linguistic nativism not only regarding the learning mechanisms that are involved in the acquisition of natural languages, but also regarding the categories and the structures to be learned (CHOMSKY 1965;1981CRAIN & LILLO-MARTIN 1999. Not only that, but they further assume that the essence of language is grammar, which is understood as being completely independent from other levels of linguistic analysis as well as from other cognitive systems (MARANTZ 1995;NEWMEYER 1998). Hence, it is easily assumed that, on the one hand, grammar is independent from the rest of linguistic domains (i.e. from phonology, the lexicon, pragmatics, etc.) and, on the other hand, that grammar is innate and part of our phylogenetic inheritance (CHOMSKY 1965). ...
Article
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The linguistic mainstream typically describes first-language acquistion as a process involving innate species-and domain-specific abilities. Such accounts of syntactic development conceive the primary linguistic input as too limited for language acquisition to take place. The present paper discusses word categorization skills and strategies in small children. Recent empirical evidence shows that very young English-learning children are able to extract salient phonological features of words in their language and use them for accurate word categorization. In addition to this, young children also appear to use statistical regularities from fluent speech in order to group grammatically similar words together. Of special importance to these findings are the observations made by studies analyzing categorization outside the linguistic domain and/or the human species. Crucially, these findings note that not only linguistic input is probabilistic in nature. The upshot of these studies is that the ability to deal with probabilistically sequenced elements is neither (a) domain-specific, since it also applies to other domains of human perception and cognition, nor (b) is it species-specific, since this skill has also been found in some bird species and primates like cotton-top tamarins.
... Dans opération sélectionner, α sélectionne β. Les deux éléments doivent être compatibles pour que la configuration soit grammaticalement correcte (Chomsky 1995 ;Pollock 1997 ;Marantz 1995 Dans (1a), le SD1 « Jean » sélectionne le VTD « prend ». Suivant opération fusionner externe, SD1 et VTD fusionnent avec SD2, pour en dériver la phrase à la voix active « Jean prend le livre ». ...
... Minimalism (Chomsky 1995;Marantz 1995;Belletti & Rizzi 2002;Hornstein et al. 2005;Boeckx 2006) grew out of the success of the Principles and Parameters approach to syntax. It explores the idea that the basic operations of the human language faculty are simple and few in number, and that the attested complexities of natural language are a byproduct of the interactions of simple subsystems (Hornstein 2009). ...
Article
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Contemporary work on the evolution of syntax can be roughly divided into two perspectives. The incremental view claims that the evolution of syntax involved multiple stages between the non-combinatorial communication system of our last common ancestor with chimpanzees and modern human syntax. The saltational view claims that syntax was the result of a single evolutionary development. What is the relationship between syntactic theory and these two perspectives? Jackendoff (2010) argues that “[y]our theory of language evolution depends on your theory of language”. For example, he claims that most work within the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995) is forced to the saltational view. In this paper it is argued that there is not a dependency relation between theories of syntax and theories of syntactic evolution. The parallel architecture (Jackendoff 2002) is consistent with a saltational theory of syntactic evolution. The architecture assumed in most minimalist work is compatible with an incremental theory.
... Thus far, we have illustrated the syntactic identity of Arabic DPs in broad terms to prove how such a constituent can be handled within the same generative perspective that English DPs can be perceived though some parametrical mismatches inevitably surface (Marantz 1995). However, the need arise to deeply explore another significant aspect that crucially strikes distinction between Standard Arabic vs. English, on the one hand, as well as Standard Arabic vs. Jordanian Arabic, on the other hand, i.e. how inflections operate surface. ...
Article
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Arabic varieties show explicit linguistic behavior, especially at the syntactic level. This apparent diversity is mainly due to how syntactic rules confine the scope and the flexibility of movement of certain constituents inside and outside their syntactic domains. This paper examines solely how the mother tongue from which all these varieties have emanated, i.e. Standard Arabic can be obviously analyzed as a configurational language that tends to surface in a way similar to nonconfigurational languages at certain surface levels where determinative phrases 'DPs' lend themselves freely to move and result in various templates frequently realized as VSO, OVS, OSV and VOS. These configurational structures seem problematic to construe in many vernacular Arabic varieties, mainly, in Suburbanite Northern Jordanian Arabic because of the scarcity of effective inflectional morphology such varieties exploit rather than pragmatic factors.
... The Chomsky (1995) version of the MP was built over four main economy principles: Last resort, Procrastinate, Greed (later reformulated as Suicidal Greed) and Minimal link (Chomsky, 1995, Chapter 4;Marantz, 1995). Of these, both Minimal link and Last resort are based on the notion of c-command. ...
Research
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A 2009 document that I wrote for introductory courses (English Grammar I, II, and Spanish-English Comparative Grammar, UNLP, Argentina). Slightly revised and updated, but not much. Feedback on how to make this more useful for teachers and students will be appreciated.
... In other words, in French, V-features of Agr check the features of the V in overt syntax by raising of V to Agr and disappear in order to avoid surviving strong features, which cause the derivation to crash at PF, i. e. delaying V-raising until LF makes the V-features of Agr survive into PF, causing the derivation to crash at PF. Thus, the strong V-features must be checked and deleted before Spell-out (cf. Lasnik 1999, Pollock 1989, Groat/O'Neil 1996Grewendorf 2002and Marantz 1995. Because of the reasons discussed above, in French main verbs raise to Tense before spell-out in finite clauses. ...
Thesis
The main goal of this study is to provide an analysis that the free word order is derived from one underlying word by movement of constituents rather than freely base generated, and the involved movement is not an instance of last resort of movement, but rather optional. In order to show that scrambling is not constrained by the economy principles, I will analyze scrambling in terms of Minimalism. Another issue in this study is that IP-adjoined Clause Internal Scrambling as well as Long Distance Scrambling exhibit mixed A and A' properties, unlike the suggestion that Long Distance Scrambling poses only A'-properties, as proposed by Saito (1989;2001) and Mahajan (1990), although their assumptions have been generally accepted in scrambling research. On the other hand, both VP-adjoined Clause Internal Scrambling and Long Distance Scrambling in Korean only pose A'-properties. The investigation is mainly based on Korean data, comparing it with that of other scrambling languages such as Japanese, German, Hindi-Urdu and Russian, which have their own language specific properties. This study is organized as follows; Chapter 2 deals with the properties of movement. Chapter 3 contains two different views of scrambling. Chapter 4 examines the multiple subject and object construction in Korean. Chapter 5 contains the properties of Long Distance Scrambling. In chapter 6 I will explore the properties of wh-phrase and wh-scrambling. In chapter 7 I will investigate the properties of Topicalization, Quantifier Raising and Object Shift. Finally, chapter 8 summarize the main argument of this study and conclude with my remarks.
... In other words, in French, V-features of Agr check the features of the V in overt syntax by raising of V to Agr and disappear in order to avoid surviving strong features, which cause the derivation to crash at PF, i. e. delaying V-raising until LF makes the V-features of Agr survive into PF, causing the derivation to crash at PF. Thus, the strong V-features must be checked and deleted before Spell-out (cf. Lasnik 1999, Pollock 1989, Groat/O'Neil 1996Grewendorf 2002and Marantz 1995. Because of the reasons discussed above, in French main verbs raise to Tense before spell-out in finite clauses. ...
... In terms of the analysis proposed below, at this point of the derivation the expression in question has not yet been semantically identified as the antecedent of the reflexive pronoun, that is, in the technical sense, as the expression with which the reflexive is coreferentially linked. 24 Other pioneering works in this regard includeKuroda (1988),Stowell (1989),Giorgi and Longobardi (1991),Marantz (1995) andLongobardi (1999).25 As regards the category v* referred to in (18),Chomsky (2006:12) states that "verbal phrases are of the form v-VP, where v can be v*, the functional category that heads verb phrases with full argument structure"; he (2005b:10) mentions "transitive and experiencer constructions" as examples of phrases with a v* as head. ...
Article
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This paper deals with the phenomenon of obligatory reflexivity in Afrikaans. Adopting the general framework of Minimalist Syntax, an attempt is made to develop a novel analysis of this phenomenon that can provide a conceptually adequate account for the facts, and that is amenable to extension beyond Afrikaans. The basic idea underlying the proposed “nominal shell analysis (of obligatory reflexivity)” (NSA) is that two expressions which enter into an obligatory coreferential relationship – in this case, the reflexive and its antecedent – are initially merged into the same constituent. It is proposed that these two expressions form part of a nominal shell structure which is headed by an identity focus light noun n, a functional category which belongs to a natural class of identificational (or quantificational) elements. This n represents the locus of the –self suffix that is normally found with reflexive pronouns in Afrikaans. The coreferential relationship between the reflexive and its antecedent is established in this nominal shell via phi(φ)-feature valuation, with the light noun acting as intermediary. It is claimed that the NSA can provide an empirically adequate account of the relevant facts without appealing to any theoretical devices or features that are not provided by or that are incompatible with the basic assumptions and concepts of Minimalist Syntax.
... The first one is to give up the hypothesis of the autonomy of syntax, which has been central to Generative Grammar from the earliest models to the Principles and Parameters (P&P) framework. This possibility has-been raised by Marantz (1995) with respect to the Minimalist Program, because the multilevel architecture of P&P is drastically reduced to the interface levels (PF and LF) and the conditions that hold at these levels are of a phonological/semantic nature. 2 Still, the problem remains of what concept of Economy is invoked, its generality and its impact in semantic interpretation. The relevant scheme of Economy would be the following: let all derivations that involve the same "Numeration" (or collection of lexical items) and terminate in LFs that have the same interpretation be compared; choose that derivation that involves the least number of steps, and whose steps are the shortest. ...
Article
In this paper several scope asymmetries in VP ellipsis constructions in English and Spanish are studied. It is argued that an approach based on Fox' (1995 a,b) Ellipsis Scope Generalization faces numerous conceptual and empirical problems. Ellipsis resolution is conceived of as a phenomenon belonging to the conceptual-intentional pan of the computational system that is conditioned by the computation of the semantic features of quantifiers at LF. A semantic approach inspired in higher order unification theories of ellipsis is defended. This approach is compatible with the overall philosophy of minimalist grammar: the process of higher-order unification complies with the principle of inclusiveness (Chomsk-y. 19 or projection from the lexicon because the relevant semantic equations are set up and resolved at a discourse level, but they are determined by feature-sensitive Logical Forms.
Thesis
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Se asume en la grainalica generativa que unicamente los verbos conjugados licencian sujetos explicitos. Sin embargo, en espanol, dichos sujetos explicitos aparecen en las clausulas de infinitivo no regidas, {[De venir Pedro], habrd problemas), Lagunilla (1987) y Hemanz (1999). Esta tesis investiga la licenciacion de los sujetos explicitos de infinitivo y la allernancia entre estos sujetos y PRO. Tras revisar los analisis anteriores. Lagunilla (1987), Suner (1994), Torre go (1998) y Rigau (1995), postulo: (i) que los infinitivos tienen concordancia abstracta (Rigau (1995) y Torrego (1998)); (ii) la existencia de an mecanismo de absorcion de concordancia por parte del rector en el caso de los infinitivos incluidos en clausulas regidas. En este analisis, los infinitivos no regidos tendrfan concordancia. Esto les permilirfa licenciar sujetos lexicos a diferencia de los infinitivos regidos. Posteriormente, incorporo esta propuesta en investigaciones sobre PRO y el PFE, Alexiadou y Anagnostopoulou (1998), Mendikoetxea (1992) y Harley (2000).
Article
This work examines the leftward unbounded movement of argument to an A' (A-bar) position in the Ibibio language-a Lower Cross-language spoken in Akwa Ibom State of Nigeria. It is the most widely spoken language in fourteen Local Government Areas of Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, Urua (2000). A-bar position or non-argument position is a position that is structurally inaccessible to θ-role and case assignment. The theoretical framework adopted for the analysis of this work is Government and Binding (GB) with a special focus on X-bar, government, case, and theta sub-theories of GB. A Sample of fifty-two sentences in the n English language relating to the research subject matter was elicited from fifty-six mature native speakers of the language. The results of the findings reveal that interrogative, topicalised, left-dislocated and cleft structures are syntactic operations which show evidence of leftward unbounded displacement of argument to a non-argument position in Ibibio. Interrogative words in Ibibio can be base-generated or optionally moved into an empty slot in the SPEC-C' at the left periphery of the sentence. When they are moved, they are obligatorily followed by the ké focus marker. Topicalisation does not show overt trace but exhibits a typical movement property of leaving a gap at the extraction site. While left dislocation is characterised by an overt trace in the form of a resumptive pronoun which also creates a case and theta chain link with the dislocated constituents in Ibibio. Clefting in Ibibio utilises the ké focus marker which narrows down the referential range of the constituent it is associated with. The ké focus marker is used as a relativiser to introduce the next clause which modifies the cleft NP.
Article
I compare three linguistic models based on different conceptions of nativism to determine whether they can provide revealing accounts of properties of natural languages, and whether the traits that these linguistic models require are evolutionarily plausible. The model based on Language-specific nativism in a broad sense contains rules, conditions, features and categories—Universal Grammar—to capture the empirical phenomena. Broad UG contains many domain-specific devices that are more descriptive than explanatory, and are unlikely to have evolved as irreducible properties of the brain. Language-specific nativism in a narrow sense tries to improve evolvability by restricting its core component to the operation set-Merge and a universal lexicon of innate concepts. But the transfer operations required to link the language-invariant expressions with actual expressions of natural languages turn out to be inapplicable. Evolvability is also problematic: the model ends up appealing to mystery on three key issues. Exapted Language Nativism posits that the human language capacity is not due to a brain development specifically devoted to language but is a side effect of a uniquely human capacity of detachment that enables an array of human-specific cognitive traits. Key among these traits is the capacity to form linguistic signs. Syntactic combinations emerge directly from the capacity to form combinatorial signs, a small natural subset of linguistic signs. The perceptual and conceptual elements of signs, and the extralinguistic cognition of speakers, have grounded prior properties that provide principled explanations of the data. The model has high evolvability since its core capacity of detachment is independently related to other phenotypic effects.
Chapter
The chapter is concerned with grammar and lexis as core components of human language. Its main aim is to elaborate on the interrelation between the two components as discussed in a number of specific formal and functional linguistic theories. From the former group, the issue is traced in such models as Government & Binding (G&B), the Minimalist Program (MP), Distributed Morphology (DM), Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) from the latter - in Dik's and Halliday's functional models and the usage-based models by Langacker and Goldberg.
Preprint
In this paper I explore whether the combination of linguistic forms into words and phrases should be understood in terms of distinct grammatical components or considered all syntax (Marantz 1997, Bruening 2018). Specifically, I take lexicalism – a theoretical position maintained by morphologists and syntacticians for fifty years – as the lens through which to understand the nature of the morphology-syntax interface and goals of grammatical theory more generally. By considering the predictions made by strong formulations of lexicalism regarding morphosyntactic interaction, in relation to specific theoretical parameters across several predominant syntactic and morphological theories, I conclude that lexicalism does not properly characterize ‘morphology’, ‘syntax’, and their ‘interface’, and neither do theories based on lexicalist assumptions.
Article
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Voice is a relationship between subject and object in relation to verb in a sentence. Fulfulde verbs have three types of voices: active voice, middle voice and passive voice. The three voices also mark tenses such as past, present, habitual, and future. In Fulfulde language, voice are attached with tenses and marked on verbs. This paper intends to look at the voice and Tense affixes that are attached to verbs, with the aim to identify which affixes are frequently used and which are not frequently used in today Adamawa Dialect. The paper will then describe the productivity of these affixes and how some are lost over time, which is probably an evidence of 'language change in progress'.
Book
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Este libro es una biografía crítica de los modelos sintácticos en gramática generativa transformacional. Se analizan las principales teorías que se han ido desarrollando entre 1957 y 2020 en el marco del programa de investigación iniciado por Noam Chomsky y otros investigadores en el Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) en la década de los ’50, fuertemente influenciados por el estructuralismo de Zellig Harris, las teorías computacionales de Alan Turing y Emil Post y el afán de explicitación y formalización que caracterizó los programas de David Hilbert y Kurt Gödel, por mencionar sólo algunos. Es importante notar que el libro no trata sobre los aspectos cognitivos o biológicos relacionados con la teoría generativa (en general agrupados bajo el nombre de ‘biolingüística’, ver, por ejemplo, Lenneberg, 1967 para una de las primeras investigaciones ‘modernas’ sobre los aspectos biológicos del lenguaje), ni tampoco sobre cuestiones de adquisición, o patología del lenguaje, aunque todos ellos sean aspectos que han recibido tratamiento dentro del programa generativo: el foco del presente libro es el desarrollo de la teoría de la sintaxis y su relación con aspectos formales de computación, a la vez que con las teorías de la semántica y la morfo-fonología, siempre en el marco generativo. No se trata de un manual de gramática, ni de una introducción a la lingüística general. Se verá en detalle cómo ha cambiado la concepción de la sintaxis en gramática generativa transformacional, lo que es y lo que hace, en el paso de reglas particulares a principios generales.
Article
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En este trabajo intentaré mostrar que el lenguaje es composicional desde la perspectiva del programa minimalista. Desde este enfoque adoptaré la noción de “lengua-I”.Específicamente, intentaré sostener que si el minimalismo es correcto, el producto de la lengua-I es composicional en virtud de restricciones generales de arquitectura cognitiva y restricciones intrínsecas al mecanismo computacional de la lengua-I. Mi argumento puede entenderse como una inferencia a la mejor explicación. La mejor explicación de que la lengua-I, en tanto sistema de expresiones que sirven de instrucciones semánticas para la interfaz conceptual-intencional, genere computacionalmente esas instrucciones y responda óptimamente a las condiciones de interfaz es, en parte, atribuyéndole composicionalidad semántica a dichas expresiones.
Chapter
This chapter is intended for persons with various backgrounds in linguistics who are interested in becoming acquainted with the general features of the development and internal logic of Government and binding theory (GB) and are ready to approach the subject from a somewhat abstract point of view. The chapter explains some of the concepts of GB theory and the axioms governing them. The formalization of a linguistic theory requires an inventory of its primitives, among which hierarchy, linear order, and labeling are given. Apart from the uncertainty about the inventory of possible labels, it is remarked in the chapter that phrase markers could be enriched with binary relations not definable in terms of hierarchy, linear order, and labeling: these included at least the antecedent–anaphor relation and the relation of predication. The dawn of syntax is marked by the realization that the structure of sentences is hierarchical—that is, behind the linear order of words and morphemes that is visible in natural languages, there is another organization in terms of larger or smaller constituents nested one within another.
Article
This study is primarily concerned with the question of how a certain type of remnant movement satisfies the Proper Binding Condition (PBC), the requirement that a trace be bound. Remnant movement is generally delineated as [...[β...tα...]...α...[...tβ...]...], in which remnant category β contains a trace of α, and yet is not overtly bound by α. Several studies on this topic have attempted to reduce the PBC to locality conditions such as the Minimal Link Condition, Phase Impenetrability Condition, and so on. The purpose of this study is to argue that a version of the PBC must be preserved independently and that PBC-effects on remnant movement are accommodated, according to the types of reconstruction applied to remnant categories.
Article
An r-expression embedded within an NP, when fronted to a sentence-initial position, cannot be coreferential with the matrix subject. Such disjoint reference, however, disappears or becomes considerably weakened when the antecedent of the r-expression is deeply embedded. We thus propose within the minimalist program that at LF an A'-chain of an argument must have a tripartite (operator-restriction-variable) structure and that the restriction containing an r-expression can be“reconstructed” into any position between the operator and the variable. Thus we can derive the weakening of disjoint reference, since the r-expression can escape from the c-command domain of deeply embedded arguments.
Article
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In this paper I will analyze the causative‐anticausative opposition from the point of view of semantic construal, and how syntax builds structures following semantic instructions that convey that information, without adding or deleting information. I will use causativity to analyze the tension that arises when a putatively universal semantic construal, (narrow‐)syntactically instantiated, is to be materialized using limited, language‐specific resources. This will touch on the subject of language typology, and its importance to describe the observable effects of this tension between semantics and morpho‐phonology, already noticed by Tesniére (1959). Our theoretical proposal will take mutually consistent elements from Conceptual Semantics, Relational Semantics, Lexical Decomposition, and Minimalism, in the search for the simplest (yet, empirically adequate) theory of the syntax semantics interface. Consequences for comparative linguistics will be suggested, with particular emphasis on Slavic, Germanic, and Romance languages.
Article
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In this paper we will analyze the conceptual and computational motivations of the property of displacement in natural languages from a revisited perspective. We will account for displacement phenomena proposing our own version of displacement-as-external token Merge, as opposed to the traditional displacement-as-literal movement or, more recently, displacement-as-copy and Merge (Chomsky, 1995; Kitahara, 1997; Nunes, 2004). As far as empirical data is concerned, we will provide a brief analysis of parasitic gaps and their derivation, comparing our proposal with previous accounts making particular stress on the idea that operations are not feature-driven in a highly constrained syntactic component, but interface-driven, syntax being free and unbounded.
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