A Syntactic Universal and Its Consequences

Biberauer, Theresa; Holmberg, Anders; Roberts, Ian

doi:10.1162/ling_a_00153

Cited by 98 publications

(100 citation statements)

References 107 publications

(69 reference statements)

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“…6 Unlike for German, there is no possibility of a head-final TP for these languages, since movement to this position would not be string-vacuous. Besides, it has been argued that a head-final TP is universally ruled out with a head-initial VP (Biberauer et al 2014). …”

Section: Cases In Which V3 Is Ruled Outmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language contact and V3 in Germanic varieties new and old

Walkden

2017

J Comp German Linguistics

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Certain recently-attested varieties of Germanic V2 languages are known to deviate from the strict V2 requirement characteristic of the standard. This is the case, for example, for Kiezdeutsch, a new German dialect, as well as urban vernacular varieties of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish: descriptively speaking, in these varieties, subject-verb inversion may be absent under certain well-defined conditions. In this article I outline those conditions and the type of syntactic analysis required to account for them, claiming that an articulated left periphery is needed to account for the findings. The similarity of the V3 patterns found in these new varieties, which are geographically isolated from each other but which share a characterization in terms of the demographics of their speaker groups, invites a diachronic account in terms of language contact. I argue that transfer cannot account for V3, but that a scenario of sequential simplification and complexification is able to do so. Finally, turning to Old English, which exhibits similar (though not identical) V2/V3 alternations, I argue that a similar synchronic analysis can be upheld and that its diachronic origins may well also have been similar-a case of using the present to inform our approach to the past.

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Section: Cases In Which V3 Is Ruled Outmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language contact and V3 in Germanic varieties new and old

Walkden

2017

J Comp German Linguistics

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“…However, such a proposal would be dubious for several reasons, as suggested by two anonymous reviewers. There is no evidence for head-final complementizers in these languages, and given the general VO order, verb movement to a head-final projection would violate the cross-linguistically robust Final-over-Final Constraint (Biberauer et al 2014). The fixed relative ordering of different discourse-marked preverbal items, however, strongly suggests that they occupy positions within the articulated C-domain.…”

Section: V>3mentioning

confidence: 91%

Verb second and its deviations: An argument for feature scattering in the left periphery

Hsu

2017

Volume 2

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This article focuses on the analysis of verb-second (V2) requirements in light of evidence that the clausal left periphery contains a series of functional projections in a fixed hierarchy (Rizzi 1997;Benincà & Poletto 2004; among many others). I discuss previous approaches to V2, the bottleneck effect and stacked head theories, and argue that they are generally unable to account for a variety of "relaxed" V2 systems that allow V3 or V4 in some contexts. I propose a new analysis of variation in the strictness of V2 in terms of the feature scattering hypothesis (Giorgi & Pianesi 1996); languages can vary in the number of functional category features that are bundled on individual heads. This allows a straightforward account for the attested typology of relaxed V2 systems, and a new explanation for cross-linguistic variation in the instantiation of functional projections.Keywords: syntax; verb-second word order; bottleneck effect; feature scattering The cartographic program and the problem of restricted instantiationFollowing Rizzi (1997) a variety of evidence has emerged to suggest that the left edge of the clause, the traditional complementizer phrase, contains additional internal structure. Numerous works within the cartographic approach propose that rather than a single projection, the left edge of the clause includes a series of distinct functional projections, collectively referred to as the extended left periphery. These functional heads perform the various functions of complementizer-like elements, generally related to clause typing and the encoding of information structure. While the body of research within the approach has given rise to many proposed structures, we will consider for illustrative purposes the "core"

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“…But here, the proform in SpecVP does not play the role of an argument: it is the CP in the complement-of-V position that serves as the argument; the proform is a secondary predicate of this CP, in a reverse predication structure. The hypothesis that the proform in the SpecVP position of bridge-verb constructions is not an argumental expression had already accounted for the non-presuppositional interpretation of the complement clause in bridge-verb constructions-and it now also derives the intervention effect seen in German (14a) and Hungarian (15): building a non-argumental bare wh-dependency across a scope-taking element is impossible (see also (16b)).…”

Section: On the Syntax Of Wh-scope Markingmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…14 The intervention effect seen in (15) and also in German (14a) can be assimilated to (16b) if the wh-scope marker (German was, Hungarian mit) is a non-argumental wh-operator in these cases. By this logic, mit in (16a) should be an argumental wh-expression: otherwise, it would be difficult to account for its immunity to nem-intervention.…”

Section: On the Syntax Of Wh-scope Markingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Clausal Subordination and the Structure of the Verbal Phrase

Dikken

2017

Languages

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Abstract:In his first approach to recursion in clausal embedding, Chomsky (1957) postulates a proform in the matrix clause linked to an independently constructed clause that, via an application of the generalised transformation, eventually becomes the matrix verb's complement. Chomsky (1965) replaces this with a direct clausal embedding analysis, with clausal recursion in the base component of the grammar. I argue here that, while direct clausal recursion is certainly needed, an update to the Chomsky's (1957) approach (minus the application of the generalised transformation) deserves a prominent place in syntactic theory as well. The discussion is based on data from Dutch, German, and Hungarian. This paper addresses the role of presuppositionality in the context of clausal coordination, the analysis of the so-called wh-scope marking construction, and the importance of Agree in connection with a subordinate clause's transparency or opacity to extraction. Central in the analysis is a perspective on the structure of the verbal phrase which accommodates two discrete structural positions for the object.

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A Syntactic Universal and Its Consequences

Cited by 98 publications

References 107 publications

Language contact and V3 in Germanic varieties new and old

Language contact and V3 in Germanic varieties new and old

Verb second and its deviations: An argument for feature scattering in the left periphery

Clausal Subordination and the Structure of the Verbal Phrase

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