The Emergence of Order in Syntax
[eng] The syntactic component of the faculty of language is a device responsible for ordering features or clusters of features, usually called categories. As to the syntactic component is concerned, Universal Grammar is a rewiring of three elements that are independently in place: (i) features (or i...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2007 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad de Barcelona |
| Repositorio: | Dipòsit Digital de la UB |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:diposit.ub.edu:2445/42054 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/2445/42054 http://www.tdx.cat/TDX-0131107-131947 http://hdl.handle.net/10803/2091 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Anglès Sintaxi Gramàtica Lingüística English language Syntax Grammar Linguistics |
| Sumario: | [eng] The syntactic component of the faculty of language is a device responsible for ordering features or clusters of features, usually called categories. As to the syntactic component is concerned, Universal Grammar is a rewiring of three elements that are independently in place: (i) features (or instructions for the levels of interpretation of the faculty of language), (ii) a combinatorial operation responsible for creating nests (sets of sets linearly ordered by the inclusion relation), and (iii) principles of analysis (which determine constituency structure and distance relations among the categories of a syntactic object). To understand the precise shape of syntactic patterns one must explore how the syntactic component feeds the morphological component and the semantic component. Firstly, it is proposed that there exist discontinuous syntactic patterns, where two covariations of a feature are assigned to two poles of a discontinuous domain. Secondly, it is argued that, in general, the semantic component requires analytic syntactic patterns with a one-to-one relation between positions and features; some combinatorial restrictions have been attributed to the Full Interpretation Condition, a legibility condition. Indeed, discontinuous syntactic patterns are argued to be no more than a subtype of analytic syntactic patterns. Thirdly, it is defended that syncretic syntactic patterns, where two features are matched in the same projection, also exist, following the Maximize Matching Effects Principle, a principle of structural minimization. The study of how features are ordered in these patterns has provided a rather simple account of several syntactic phenomena, like some of the combinatorial restrictions observed by Cinque (1999), the so-called C-Infl connection (and also the υ-V and the P-K connections), the A'-status of preverbal subjects in Null Subject Languages (Solà 1992), the alleviation of wh-island effect in English when the embedded wh-phrase is a subject (Chomsky 1986) and the dynamic V2 patterns in double agreement dialects observed by Zwart (1993). Some ideas that would deserve further attention have been proposed: (i) the C-Infl discontinuity may contract in English under some special circumstances, which renders Comp-insertion impossible, and (ii) the Relativized Opacity Principle, an alternative to Chomsky's Phase Impenetrability Condition to account both for subject islands and wh-islands. Several devices postulated in the literature, such as suicidal greed and the existence of uninterpretable features, the Extended Projection Principle and merely occurrential features (EPP/OCC) and the Vacuous Movement hypothesis, have been considered concluding that they are inaccurate and unnecessary. Importantly, no language-or-construction-specific rules redundant in its form (Chomsky 1965) or no abstract template like the X'-theory (Chomsky 1981, Chomsky & Lasnik 1993) need to be attributed to UG to derive the knowledge of hierarchy; the Linear Correspondence Axiom (Kayne 1994) neither needs to be postulated as an axiom: it is not a proposition one needs to take for granted to derive other propositions, namely the X'-theory. No more than a recursive procedure responsible for nesting categories is needed to account for the knowledge of hierarchy. |
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