The Cartography of Syntactic Structures

Abstract

Introduction Syntactic structures are complex objects, whose subtle properties have been highlighted and elucidated by half a century of formal syntactic studies, building on a much older tradition. Structures are interesting objects of their own, both in their internal constitution and in their interactions with various grammatical principles and processes. The cartography of syntactic structures is the line of research which addresses this topic: it is the attempt to draw maps as precise and detailed as possible of syntactic configurations. Broadly construed in this way, cartography is not an approach or a hypothesis: it is a research topic asking the question: what are the right structural maps for natural language syntax? Answers may differ, and very different maps may be, and have been, proposed, but the question as such inevitably arises as a legitimate and central question for syntactic theory. If it is a virtual truism that cartography can be construed as a topic and not as a framework, it is also the case that cartographic studies have often adopted certain methodological and heuristic guidelines, and also certain substantive hypotheses on the nature of syntactic structures, which form a coherent body of assumptions and a rather well-defined research direction; we will try to illustrate some ideas and results of this direction in the present chapter. If structures have, in a sense, always been central in generative grammar, the idea of focusing on structural maps arose around the early nineties, following a track parallel to and interacting with the Minimalist Program. Perhaps the main triggering factor was the explosion of functional heads identified and implied in syntactic analyses in the first ten years of the Principles and Parameters framework. One critical step was the full-fledged extension of X-bar theory to the functional elements of the clause (Chomsky 1986) as a CP-IP-VP structure; and the observation that other configurations, e.g. nominal expressions, were amenable to a hierarchical structure with a lexical projection embedded within a functional structure (such as Abney's DP hypothesis, Abney 1987). These advances provided a natural format for the study of the structure of phrases and clauses as hierarchical sequences of the same building block, the fundamental X-bar schema (or, later, elementary applications of Merge); the lowest occurrence of the building block typically is the projection of a lexical category, e.g. a noun or a verb, and this element is typically completed by a series of

Moving Verbal Chunks in the Low Functional Field

“…In particular, the Theme of "preoccupare" type verbs contains an element of causation which is absent in the "piacere" class. This can be expressed in a lexical decomposition approach à la Hale & Keyser (1993) (see Cinque (2004a), Ramchand (2008) by assuming an extra little "v" = Cause, in the functional structure of the clause:…”

The syntax of information structure and the PF interface

“…Let me summarise some of the arguments here briefly. In the interest of space, I restrict myself to those arguments that are directly concerned with the tacit assumption underlying all cartographic work, namely that there is a one-to-one mapping between designated functional projections and their interpretations at LF (Cinque & Rizzi 2008). It is clear that this tacit assumption cannot be abandoned without making the cartographic approach meaningless − it is the hallmark of cartography.…”

French adverbial clauses, rescue by ellipsis and the truncation versus intervention debate

“…This observation, coupled with cartographic views of syntax, including the hypothesis of the articulated structure of the left periphery, can be reinterpreted to mean that the restriction on fronting operations, which are operations that affect the left periphery of the clause, can be (at least partly) syntactic. In terms of a cartographic view (Rizzi 1997, Cinque andRizzi 2010), a syntactic approach to the restricted distribution of MCP can then be taken to imply that the domains that resist the type of fronting illustrated in English (1) and French (10), (11), (13e-f) are in some way structurally deficient: either these domains are truncated structures and simply lack the relevant left-peripheral landing sites targeted by the relevant fronting operations or, alternatively, while the landing sites might potentially remain available, they cannot be fully projected to accommodate such fronting operations for independent reasons. Following these two lines of thought, two types of syntactic accounts for the absence of MCP in the domains considered here have been elaborated: the truncation account and the intervention account.…”