Abstract.  Kayne (1994) was instrumental in putting linear asymmetries on the generative research agenda. His Linear Correspondence Axiom is seen as a restrictive, conceptually attractive proposal supported by a wealth of empirical evidence. In this paper, we take issue with this assessment. (i) We show that for every structure that violates the LCA, there is an LCA‐compatible counterpart, including rightward movement structures and structures with rightward specifiers. (ii) We discuss Cinque's (2005) LCA‐based analysis of word order in the extended nominal projection, demonstrating that the data in fact do not support any hypothesis stronger than a ban on rightward movement. (iii) We demonstrate that claims to the effect that central properties of phrase structure (such as headedness and the single‐specifier restriction) follow from the LCA are incorrect. (iv) We show that the LCA is toothless without a restrictive theory of movement, but that it can only be reconciled with the data in the absence of such a theory.

The so-called cartographic approach to discourse-related word-order variation is based on the idea that particular interpretations-say, contrastive focusare licensed in the specifier of particular functional projections-say, a focus phrase. In this paper we present arguments against this view based on scrambling in Dutch. We discuss a range of implementations of the cartographic approach and show that they are either too weak, in that they cannot generate all the word orders found in Dutch, or too strong, in that they fail to capture restrictions on scrambling. The alternative we present dispenses with discourse-related functional projections and instead relies on mapping rules that associate syntactic representations with representations in information structure. On this view, scrambling operations derive a syntactic configuration that matches the structural description of a mapping rule that could otherwise not apply. We suggest that it is this interface effect that licenses the marked structures created by scrambling.

We propose a new generalization governing the crosslinguistic distribution of radical pro drop (the type of pro drop found in Chinese). It occurs only in languages whose pronouns are agglutinating for case, number, or some other nominal feature. Other types of languages cannot omit pronouns freely, although they may have agreement-based pro drop. This generalization can for the most part be derived from three assumptions. (a) Spell-out rules for pronouns may target nonterminal categories. (b) Pro drop is zero spell-out (i.e., deletion) of regular pronouns. (c) Competition between spell-out rules is governed by the Elsewhere Principle. A full derivation relies on an acquisitional strategy motivated by the absence of negative evidence. We test our proposal using data from a sample of twenty languages and The World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath et al. 2005).

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IntroductionAs is well-known, topics and foci have dedicated positions in a variety of languages. This paper is concerned with the question of what this fact can tell us about the typology of information-structural notions and their mapping to the syntax. We argue that the data support two conclusions, both of which can be shown to clash with a cartographic outlook on sentence structure (for a general overview of the cartographic framework, see Cinque 2002, Rizzi 2003, and Belletti 2004. The first is that there are no fixed landing sites for topic and focus movement. The second is that there are cross-cutting generalizations over topics, over foci, and over contrastive elements. These jointly motivate the following four-way typology:

This chapter argues that Cinque's (2005) result concerning the noun phrase internal order of demonstrative, numeral, adjective, and noun can be derived with- appeal to Kayne's (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom. It claims that a theory which allows branching to the left and to the right but restricts (at least certain kinds of) movement to the left has a better chance of explaining universal word-order asymmetries than theories based on the Linear Correspondence Axiom, because these necessarily invoke movement in an unconstrained way.

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In this paper we explore what primitives of syntax may explain why grammatical relations are obligatory, unique, local and sensitive to c-command. We propose that these properties follow from the way information percolates in syntactic trees (as regulated by compositionality) and the way information in nodes is organized (as regulated by set theory). IntroductionGrammatical relations -binding, movement, predication and the licensing of negative polarity items -display a cluster of properties that Koster (1987) refers to as the configurational matrix. They are obligatory in that a dependent element must have an antecedent. Moreover, the antecedent must be unique, in a c-commanding position and sufficiently close to the dependent.An explanation for the configurational matrix is in order, as it can hardly be accidental that it holds of the four relations mentioned above, which are prima facia very different in nature. Moreover, as Koster points out, the properties of grammatical relations are by no means necessary -non-syntactic relations such as coreference do not display them. It must be the case, then, that the configurational matrix reflects primitives of syntax.In this paper, we explore what the primitives in question could be. We argue that a grammatical relation is established if a function introduced by a dependent is copied upward until it directly dominates a node which satisfies it (section 2). This allows us to capture the properties of c-command (section 3) and obligatoriness (section 4). We further argue that nodes are minimally ordered sets of attributes (section 5). From this, it can be derived that the antecedent in a grammatical relation is unique (section 6), but Neeleman & van de Koot 4741 Throughout this paper we will talk about syntax as if it is a derivational system. It should be noted from the outset that we only do so for presentational purposes and that nothing of substance depends on it.2 Indeed, in many theories sisterhood or a variant thereof is adopted. Government-binding theory and its successors assume that selection and internal ,-role assignment take place under sisterhood (cf. Chomsky 1981(cf. Chomsky , 1986b. Similar statements are made in LFG (cf. Bresnan 1982), GPSG (cf. and HPSG (cf. Pollard & Sag 1987, 1994. In categorial grammar, combinatory rules apply to adjacent entities only (cf. Steedman 1993). Adjacency and sisterhood are of course different notions, but like sisterhood, adjacency can be seen as a minimal sideways relation.