Michael Brody

One More Time

Hornstein (1998) argued, like Brody (1995), that a theory with both chain and move is redundant, that one of them should be eliminated. He presented two arguments that the concept of A-chains should not be part of the grammar. In my comments (Brody 1999), I showed that the arguments for this way of eliminating the redundancy are flawed and that their background is dubious. Hornstein in his reply (2000) disagrees but, as set out below, without valid argument. His reply further discredits in various ways the position I reacted to.

Overt Scope in Hungarian

The focus of this paper is the syntax of inverse scope in Hungarian, a language that largely disambiguates quantifier scope at Spell–Out. Inverse scope is attributed to alternate orderings of potentially large chunks of structure, but with appeal to base–generation, as opposed to non–feature–driven movement as in Kayne 1998. The proposal is developed within mirror theory and conforms to the assumption that structures are antisymmetrical. The paper also develops a matching notion of scope in terms of featural domination, as opposed to c–command, and applies it to otherwise problematic cases of pied piping. Finally, the interaction of different quantifier types is examined, and the patterns are explained invoking morphological considerations on one hand and A′–reconstruction on the other.

Projection and Phrase Structure

Perfect Syntax dispenses with the idea of externally forced imperfections in syntax. This article presents a system of principles relating (L) LF representations and lexical items that aims to be compatible with this assumption. The core of this theory is that phrase structures are viewed as projection lines (lexical items and their projections) linked by an Insert relation. This explains uniqueness and locality of projection, the fact that phrases and nonphrasal elements can immediately dominate each other only when they are part of the same projection line, and most effects of the target projects requirement. I attribute a residue to the Generalized Projection Principle, for which I also provide an explanation. In addition, I explore various consequences of the present approach for the Move/Chain relation.