Michelle Sheehan

The philosophy of universal grammar

1. The project of a science of language 2. Before there was grammar 3. The content of grammar 4. Deriving the formal ontology of Language 5. Cross-linguistic variation 6. The rationality of case 7. Language and speciation 8. Biolinguistic variation 9. Thought, language, and reality

Introduction: Particles through a modern syntactic lens

The focus of this special edition is the syntactic nature of the poorly understood group of elements designated particles in the descriptive, typological and generative literature. To date, particles have generally been treated in one of two mutually contradictory ways: on the one hand, they have been excluded from consideration alongside functionally or semantically similar non-particle elements; on the other, they have, largely uncritically, been classified as categories no different from non-particles. Thus, for example, Greenberg (1963) famously excluded “uninflected auxiliaries” from his discussion of auxiliary placement relative to the verb and object, basing his Universal 16, regarding the tendency for V, O and Aux placement to be “harmonic” – i.e. either AuxVO or OVAux, or, in generative terms, either consistently head-initial or consistently head-final – exclusively on the behaviour of inflected auxiliaries. By contrast, it is very common in the modern generative literature to find particles being described as heads of various more or less articulated types. Consider, for example, the various C-(related) particles in Celtic and Sinitic languages as these are discussed by i.a. Duffield (1995), Roberts (2005), Li (2006) and Paul (forthcoming): for these researchers, as for many others, including three of the authors contributing to the present volume (Aldridge, Bayer and Obenauer, and Reintges), C-particles instantiate heads (e.g. Force, Focus, Topic, Int, Fin) which may also be realised by elements not generally viewed as particles e.g. fully-fledged finite or non-finite complementisers (cf. i.a. Rizzi 1997, 2001). Against this background, the articles in this special edition consider a range of

Movement from the Double Object Construction Is Not Fully Symmetrical

A movement asymmetry arises in some languages that are otherwise symmetrical for both A- and Ā-movement in the double object construction, including Norwegian, North-West British English, and a range of Bantu languages including Zulu and Lubukusu: a Theme object can be Ā-moved out of a Recipient (Goal) passive, but not vice versa. Our explanation of this asymmetry is based on phase theory— more specifically, a stricter version of the Phase Impenetrability Condition proposed by Chomsky (2001). The effect is that, in a Theme passive, a Recipient object destined for the C-domain gets trapped within the lower V-related phase by movement of the Theme. The same effect is observed in Italian, a language in which only Theme passives are possible. A similar effect is also found in some Bantu languages in connection with object marking/agreement: object agreement with the Theme in a Recipient passive is possible, but not vice versa. We show that this, too, can be understood within the theory that we articulate.