Deriving the functional hierarchy

Abstract

There is a tension between Chomsky's recent Minimalist theory and the cartographic program initiated by Cinque. Cinque's cartography argues for a large number of finegrained categories organized in one or more universal Rich Functional Hierarchies (RFH). The subtlety of the evidence and the richness of the inventory virtually force an innatist approach. In contrast, Chomsky argues for a minimal role for UG (MUG), shifting the burden to extralinguistic cognition, learning, and what he calls third factor principles such as principles of efficient computation. In this paper we reconcile the austere MUG vision of Chomsky with the impressive empirical evidence that Cinque and others have presented for RFH. We argue (building on previous work) that some Cartographic work overstates the universality of the orders observed, and furthermore conflates several different sources of ordering. Ordering sources include scope, polarity, and semantic category. Once these factors are properly understood, there remains an irreduceable universal functional hierarchy, for example that which orders epistemic modality and tense over root modality and aspect, and that which orders the latter over argument structure and Aktionsart (as discussed in much previous work). This residual core functional hierarchy (CFH) is unexplained so far by work which follows MUG. Rather than simply stipulating the CFH as part of UG, we reconcile CFH with MUG by detailing what nonlinguistic cognition must look like in order for MUG to derive the CFH. We furthermore show how an individual language develops a languagespecific RFH which is consistent with the universal CFH, illustrating with a detailed account of the English auxiliary system.

The secret nominal life of Afrikaans intransitive adpositions

“…Pretorius 2017 for detailed e.g. Ramchand and Svenonius (2014) in adopting a system where the formal features comprising the functional spine are syntactico-semantic in nature. These are probably drawn into the linguistic system during language learning from a conceptual system outside of the language faculty.…”

“…The architecture of the grammar is in line with that assumed by Nanosyntax, although the analysis is not carried out in that framework. 9 Ramchand and Svenonius (2014) argue that the order of the functional sequence is not rigid across the board. 10 Cf.…”

The Syntax of simple and compound tenses in Ndebele

“…For instance, functional categories, such as Tense, Aspect, Mood, Negation, tend to come in a fixed order cross-linguistically. These fixed orders of functional categories are referred to as Functional Hierarchies (Cinque, 1999), or Hierarchies of Projections (Adger & Svenonius, 2011;Ramchand & Svenonius, 2014). Such hierarchies are treated as universal and not built by selection-triggered Merge -they are pre-defined and fixed.…”

Information structure and its syntactic manifestation in Spanish: facts and proposals

“…The second involves following the approach in Wiltschko (2014) and Ramchand & Svenonius (2014): the clausal architecture is divided in distinct areas, such as the T area (for situations or anchoring, depending on the approach), the C area (for propositions or linking), the V area (for events or for classification), etc. One could imagine that these areas are abstract, as Wiltschko does, and that they can be replicated in nominal constituents, for instance, opening the door to the existence of focus positions outside from CPs.…”

“…One could imagine that these areas are abstract, as Wiltschko does, and that they can be replicated in nominal constituents, for instance, opening the door to the existence of focus positions outside from CPs. The big areas are ordered by semantic principles (eg., as Ramchand & Svenonius 2014 do, the C-T-V order is motivated by propositions containing situations that contain events), but within each area the order could be freer, or be subject to interpretability conditions specific of each one of the areas. When one area is weak, its complement might also be similarly weak: for instance, an impoverishment in the C area might be accompanied by an impoverishment of the higher area where the speaker and addressee perspective is defined, explaining the distribution of MCPs that we have pointed out several times in the course of this article.…”