Linguistic Variation Yearbook - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2006

For the last half-century, biolinguistics, the study of the biology of language, has focused on the classical “what” and “how” questions in biology: (1) What is knowledge of language?, (2) How does language develop in the child? and (3) How does language evolve in the species? The answers to questions (1)–(3) have in turn stimulated investigation into the deeper “why” question; viz., why are the principles of language what they are? (the basis for the “minimalist” program). The answers to all of these questions will provide insight into the “unification problem;” viz., how the study of language can be integrated with the rest of the natural sciences. We review some recent investigations into these questions.

Russian and Polish consistently lack standard ‘long-distance’, or cross-clausal, syntactic movement dependencies in both A- and A′- domains: movement is restricted to a finite tensed clause. I refer to languages that display this radical version of locality as ‘single cycle’ languages. Given that long-distance dependencies are necessarily formed over a structure built in a recursive manner (e.g. with iterated CP or TP node), the existence of ‘single cycle’ languages highlights the need to separate the property of recursion from the ability of basic assembly, in structure building. With such separation, it becomes possible to account for ‘single cycle’ languages by hypothesizing that the device responsible for recursion is inoperative in these languages. The current minimalist conception of Merge, in contrast, inherently combines recursion with other ‘assembling’ properties. I argue, therefore, for a method of structure building that goes back to LSLT and is currently implemented in Tree Adjoining Grammars in which (clausal) recursion is relegated to a separate operation called Adjoining. ‘Single cycle’ languages thus provide direct evidence that something like Adjoining is independently needed in the grammar.

This paper examines determiner sharing from a crosslinguistic perspective. After reviewing the restrictions on English determiner sharing, it prevents new data, coming mostly from Polish, showing that these restrictions are not universal. The properties of Polish determiner sharing are further shown to be problematic for the currently most popular analysis of this construction, the so-called small conjunct analysis of Johnson (2000) and Lin (2000). The alternative suggested in the paper, based on Citko’s (2005) multi-dominance analysis of ATB wh-movement, derives the properties of determiner sharing from a structure in which the determiner is literally shared between the two conjuncts.

The Person Case Constraint (PCC) blocks a 1st/2nd person DP from Agree and Case assignment if it is separated from a probe by an intervener. I examine four separate strategies that circumvent the PCC: through giving the blocked DP case and agreement that would not otherwise be possible (absolutive displacement Basque; Jahnsson’s Rule in Finnish), by realizing the intervener elsewhere (3 to 5 Demotion in French), or by realizing the DP’s person features differently (Object Camouflage in Georgian). The striking feature these strategies share is that they are restricted to PCC contexts and not freely available. This makes it impossible to view them as paraphrase. Stating the conditions on their distribution requires reference to the failed PCC derivation, that is trans-derivational comparison. I extend the reference set computation of Fox (1995, 2000) and Reinhart (1995, 1999) to account for these strategies as the addition of a φ-probe, and suggest an extension to dependent Case.

This paper reconsiders the analysis of Transitive Expletive Constructions (TECs) across Germanic in light of recent developments in the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995 et seq.). I argue that prevailing views of expletives as merged directly into the Spec-TP position are untenable under the Probe-Goal Agree system of Minimalist Inquiries, and propose that T is anomalous amongst the core functional categories (C, T, v) in lacking the Merge-Expl property. This anomaly, I propose, is reducible to another anomaly setting T apart from C and v, namely T’s status as a nonphase head. It follows from the resolution of a basic indeterminacy in the composition of phases that Expl must merge in Spec-vP, the Object Shift position. This, in turn, throws new light on the patterns of complementary distribution that characterize the interaction between Expl, external arguments, and raised internal arguments exhibited by TECs. A strong form of Bures’s Generalization emerges — TECs are directly tied to the availability of full-DP Object Shift in a manner that is arguably both empirically and conceptually superior to existing analyses. Universal, interface-imposed, phase-based constraints on Object Shift and Merge-Expl are thus sufficient to account for the observed patterns of crosslinguistic variation in TEC distribution.

This paper offers a view of clause structure based on semantic interpretability, focusing on the structure and interpretation of temporal (tense, aspect) and modal elements. It proposes that modality has a unitary lexical semantics along the lines of Krater (1977 et seq), with different interpretations of modals deriving from the interaction of that semantics with the interpretation of the temporal elements in the structural context the modals are found. Different positions for modal interpretation are proposed, corresponding the the edges of phases (Chomsky 2001). Evidence for this view is put forward from various languages. The clause structure so derived is akin to the universal clausal hierarchy proposed by Cinque (1999), lending support to the notion that something like this hierarchy does indeed hold in natural language, though the justification for it is very different.

This article deals mainly with the distribution and function of the infinitival marker in Standard German and in Alemannic, a dialect spoken in Southern Germany.* At first sight both form and distribution differ in these two variants to a great extent. The most important difference is that Alemannic generally lacks the infinitival marker zu (to in English, te in Dutch) in the environments where it occurs in SG. Instead, bare infinitives are used to a much greater extent than in SG. A detailed comparison shows how these Alemannic data can shed some new light on SG infinitival constructions — which are notoriously hard to analyze, especially the use of zu. It will turn out that zu plays hardly any syntactic role in restructuring contexts and is thus best accounted for in the word formation component rather than in the syntax. Another important issue to be discussed is extraposition. As will be shown below, extraposition is a much more widely used option in Alemannic than in SG — nevertheless, the Alemannic constructions show mono-clausal, i.e. coherent properties. I will argue that extraposition should not be taken as an indication for a bi-clausal structure — as it is done traditionally — but rather that the preferred intraposed order in SG should be analyzed in terms of a PF “flip-operation”. The attested variation between SG and Alemannic will thus turn out to be merely variation on the surface. But there are constructions where both variants differ more profoundly, namely in the context of propositional verbs. These differences will be traced back to the existence of a second kind of zu — existing only in SG — that can indeed license a full CP.