Jonathan David Bobaljik

A-CHAINS AT THE PF-INTERFACE: COPIES AND 'COVERT' MOVEMENT

This paper develops an argument for the copy theory ofmovement based on consideration of Holmbergs Generalization [HG], a well-documented constrainton object shift in the Germanic languages. A particular formulation of HG is presented,tying it to verb movement, and this is defended against the alternative formulation presented inHolmberg (1999). It is argued that HG is the result of a morphophonological constraint on verbinflection, requiring merger under PF-adjacency,support for which comes from differences betweenVO and OV languages. The account of HG is related to PF-merger proposals fordo-support, and a theory of adverb ordering within the Spell Out component is sketched,accounting for the apparent invisibility of adverbs, problematic on earlier approaches. On thestandard model, the characterization of HG presented here requires invocation of a PF filter;the copy theory permits an alternative with more local evaluation. By treating the overt/covertdistinction as an effect of which copy is pronounced, the copy theory allows satisfaction of the PFadjacency constraint for merger to be a PF matter. Moving to a model in which both LF and PF have theability to privilege either the higher or lower position in a non-trivial chain predicts theexistence of a range of phenomena in which the lower position is privileged by both LF and PF. It isargued that such phenomena are attested, and further implications of the copy theory are explored.

Syncretism without paradigms: Remarks on Williams 1981, 1994

Plank (1991) begins with the observation that “[t]he earliest extant grammatical texts are paradigms” (p. 161). The long linguistic and philological traditions have established a wealth of knowledge about the properties of paradigms, notably regarding the issue of syncretism, but one fundamental question has not been definitively answered, namely (1): (1) Does knowledge of language (grammar) include knowledge (memorization) of paradigms themselves or just of the pieces that constitute paradigms and rules for generating them?

Realizing Germanic Inflection: Why Morphology Does Not Drive Syntax

This paper examines and evaluates what may be called the “Rich Agreement Hypothesis” (RAH) in the domain of verb movement asymmetries in Germanic. The most prominent current accounts (e.g., Rohrbacher’s 1999 Morphology-Driven Syntax) require inspection of the internal make-up of paradigms and take overt morphological variation to be the cause of syntactic variation. A survey of the literature shows that these proposals are empirically untenable in their strong (bi-conditional) form; there are numerous cases of syntactic variation attested in the absence of corresponding morphological variation. The strongest sustainable descriptive generalization is a one-way implication from rich morphology to verb movement. Though this has been noted before, its implications have not been adequately discussed. While morphology-driven approaches could have explained a strong RAH, when faced with the weaker, one-way implication, they can provide no account of why that correlation should hold and are thus at best incomplete. That is, they provide no insight as to why there are no languages with rich morphology but in which the finite verb remains in the VP. The particular correlations that are attested, and in particular the absence of a certain class of languages, do however follow from a theory which takes morphology to be not the cause but rather a reflection of syntactic structure, in line with common theorizing in morphology. The inflection-movement correlations that do exist therefore challenge rather than support morphology-driven approaches to morphosyntax.

Word Order and Scope: Transparent Interfaces and the ¾ Signature

A recurring pattern of partial correlations between word order variation and scope possibilities (the ¾ signature) supports a particular view of economy constraints in syntax, with these properties: (1) There are economy conditions (soft constraints) that value a particular type of correspondence between LF and PF representations. (2) These constraints are unidirectional: LF (broadly construed) is calculated first and determines PF (surface word order). (3) Scope rigidity is a property not of languages but of specific configurations, and the distribution of rigidity effects is (largely) predictable from independent variation in the syntactic resources of various languages. We focus here on the interaction of these three assumptions and on the role of (2) in predicting the ¾ signature effect. We contrast our proposal with Reinhart’s (2005) Interface Economy model, in which economy conditions regulate a mapping that takes overt structure as its input and yields permissible interpretations.

Missing persons: A case study in morphological universals

Abstract This article offers a case study of three absolute universals ranging over inventories of person marking in morphology. Certain logically possible distinctions are never drawn in morpheme inventories (either as pronouns or as agreement markers), though these distinctions may be expressed in other ways (and hence are not impossible a priori or for reasons of general cognition). After reviewing the literature, and dismissing apparent counter-examples, I submit that these universals bear on issues of formal versus functional explanation in linguistics, and suggest that the functionalist explanations of these facts currently on offer fall short of the mark. At least in this domain, it appears that there is a universal inventory of features which delimits the range of possible “persons” in language.

Adjacency, PF, and extraposition

In the OV Germanic languages, certain verbs selecting infinitival complements (roughly, the restructuring predicates) appear to form a tight cluster with the heads of their complements. This is particularly striking in Dutch, where clustering is overtly signaled in some contexts by an inversion of the order of the two verbal heads (assuming a head-final base order). This inversion motivated the original movement (verb raising) analysis in Evers (1975) whereby the embedded verb adjoins to the selecting head, as indicated in (1b). An alternative analysis without syntactic head movement, offered by Haegeman and Van Riemsdijk (1986), takes the inversion to be a PF phenomenon, as sketched in (1c).

If The Head Fits ... : on the morphological determination of Germanic syntax

This paper investigates the role of morphology-syntax interactions in explaining apparent parametric variation in Germanic syntax. It is argued that the Spec, TP parameter (Bures 1993; Bobaljik and Jonas 1996) is a reflex of aspects of the inflectional morphology that divide the Germanic languages into two groups, and not simply an arbitrary parameter as previously assumed. The theory of distributed morphology is adopted and leads to the following position. Complementary distribution between tense and agreement markers in a language must be taken to reflect FUSION of the functional heads in that language. This fusion is only possible if head movement in the syntax has concatenated the relevant heads in a specific configuration. The required configuration in turn follows from a derivation that precludes the licensing of Spec, TP. Thus, only languages that do not have this complementarity in their inflectional morphology may utilize the syntactic derivation that licenses the specifier of TP

Re: CycLin and the role of PF in Object Shift

Abstract This volume’s two target articles explore novel approaches to word order alternations, especially Scandinavian Object Shift. They share the common perspective that aspects of linear order long considered the exclusive purview of syntax may be better understood if the burden of explanation is split between phonological and syntactic modules. The two articles differ substantially, however, in how this general hunch plays out, in particular in the amount of the explanation that is attributed to extra-syntactic factors. Fox and Pesetsky’s ‘‘Cyclic Linearization’’ model (hereafter F&P, CycLin) is compatible with familiar syntactic models, and can be seen as a filter running (cyclically) on the output of syntactic derivations. F&P suggest that their proposal can explain various heretofore stipulated conditions on syntactic operations as consequences of the architecture of their system and a single axiom about linearization. Erteschik-Shir’s proposal in ‘‘Sound Patterns of Syntax’’ (hereafter E-S) is more radical, in the sense that far less of the familiar syntax is retained; where for CycLin movement is still a syntactic process, on E-S’s view a good deal of traditionally syntactic movement must be rethought in linear, rather than hierarchical terms. Both articles are largely exploratory and leave many of the details still to be spelled-out. To engage the ideas on specifics, then, will involve to some degree making some educated guesses about what ancillary assumptions the relevant authors might condone. I will therefore restrict myself to a few comments at a general level, though it will be impossible to do justice to these authors’ ideas in the allotted space.