Derivations: Exploring the Dynamics of Syntax (Routledge Leadinglinguists)

DERIVATIONS Derivations draws together some of the most inﬂuential work of one of the world’s leading syntactitians, J...

Author: Juan Uriagereka

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DERIVATIONS

Derivations draws together some of the most inﬂuential work of one of the world’s leading syntactitians, Juan Uriagereka. These essays provide several empirical analyses and technical solutions within the Minimalist Program. The book pursues a naturalistic take on Minimalism, explicitly connecting a variety of linguistic principles and conditions to arguably analogous laws and circumstances in nature. The book can be seen as an argument for a computational approach to the language faculty. It presents an analysis of various central linguistic notions such as Case, agreement, obviation, rigidity, from a derivational perspective. Concrete studies are provided, covering phenomena ranging from the nature of barriers for extraction to the make-up of categories, and using data from many languages including Spanish, English and Basque. This book will be of interest not only to the working syntactician, but also those more generally concerned with word architecture. Juan Uriagereka is Professor at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Rhyme and Reason and co-editor of Step by Step. He has recently been awarded the sixth Euskadi Prize for scientiﬁc research by the Basque Government.

ROUTLEDGE LEADING LINGUISTS Series editor Carlos P. Otero

1 ESSAYS ON SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS James Higginbotham 2 PARTITIONS AND ATOMS OF CLAUSE STRUCTURE Subjects, agreement, case and clitics Dominique Sportiche 3 THE SYNTAX OF SPECIFIERS AND HEADS Collected essays of Hilda J. Koopman Hilda J. Koopman 4 CONFIGURATIONS OF SENTENTIAL COMPLEMENTATION Perspectives from Romance languages Johan Rooryck 5 ESSAYS IN SYNTACTIC THEORY Samuel David Epstein 6 ON SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS Richard K. Larson 7 COMPARATIVE SYNTAX AND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Luigi Rizzi 8 MINIMALIST INVESTIGATIONS IN LINGUISTIC THEORY Howard Lasnik 9 DERIVATIONS Exploring the dynamics of syntax Juan Uriagereka

DERIVATIONS Exploring the dynamics of syntax

Juan Uriagereka

London and New York

First published 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2002 Juan Uriagereka All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Uriagereka, Juan. Derivations : exploring the dynamics of syntax / Juan Uriagereka. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Grammar, Comparative and general – Syntax. 2. Minimalist theory (Linguistics) I. Title. P291 .U748 2002 415–dc21 2001058962 ISBN 0-203-99450-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-24776-4 (Print Edition)

PARA ELENA, ISABEL Y EL BICHITO

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

1 Introduction

1

2 Conceptual matters

22

PART I

Syntagmatic issues

43

3 Multiple spell-out

45

4 Cyclicity and extraction domains with Jairo Nunes

66

5 Minimal restrictions on Basque movements

86

6 Labels and projections: a note on the syntax of quantiﬁers with Norbert Hornstein 7 A note on successive cyclicity with Juan Carlos Castillo

115 136

8 Formal and substantive elegance in the Minimalist Program: on the emergence of some linguistic forms

147

PART II

Paradigmatic concerns

177

9 Integrals with Norbert Hornstein and Sara Rosen

vii

179

CONTENTS

10 From being to having: questions about ontology from a Kayne/Szabolcsi syntax

192

11 Two types of small clauses: toward a syntax of theme/ rheme relations with Eduardo Raposo

212

12 A note on rigidity

235

13 Parataxis with Esther Torrego

253

14 Dimensions of natural language with Paul Pietroski

266

15 Warps: some thoughts on categorization

288

Notes Bibliography Index

318 347 358

viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Since this constitutes the bulk of what I have written about in the last few years, to do justice to everyone who has contributed to it would take me another book. My debt to my co-authors (Norbert Hornstein, Paul Pietroski, Eduardo Raposo, Sara Rosen, Esther Torrego and my former students Juan Carlos Castillo and Jairo Nunes) can hardly be expressed; not only did they make my life easier, they also made the collaborative pieces, by far, the best ones. Similarly, I cannot repay a fraction of what I got from those who have inﬂuenced me the most, in particular those mentioned in the introduction. I am especially thankful to those linguists who sat in my classes, from Maryland and several other institutions, and those who allowed me to be on their thesis committee, at their own risk. Only for them and with them, have these pages begun to make any sense. I thank Carlos Otero for his guidance and for giving me the opportunity to put these ideas together, and the editorial staff of Routledge for making it possible, especially Rosemary Morlin. Thanks also to my editorial assistants Acrisio Pires and Ilhan Cagri, as well as to Haroon and Idris Mokhtarzada, who designed the graphs in the last chapters. Finally, I more than thank my wife for having given me a daughter who is truly in a different dimension. Chapter 2, Section 1, “Book review: Noam Chomsky, The Minimalist Program,” is reprinted from Lingua 107: 267–73 (1999), with permission from Elsevier Science. Chapter 2, Section 2, “On the emptiness of ‘design’ polemics,” is reprinted from Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18.4: 863–71 (2000), with permission from Kluwer Academic Publishers. Chapter 2, Section 3, “Cutting derivational options,” is reprinted from Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 19.4 (2001), with kind permission from Kluwer Academic Publishers. Chapter 3, “Multiple spell-out,” is reprinted from S. D. Epstein and N. Hornstein (eds) Working Minimalism, 251–82 (1999), with permission from MIT Press. Chapter 4, “Cyclicity and extraction domains,” with Jairo Nunes, is reprinted from Syntax 3:1: 20–43 (2000), with permission from Blackwell Publishers. ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chapter 5, “Minimal restrictions on Basque movements,” is reprinted from Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 17.2: 403–44 (1999), with permission from Kluwer Academic Publishers. Chapter 8, “Formal and substantive elegance in the Minimalist Program: on the emergence of some linguistic forms,” is reprinted from C. Wilder, H.-M. Gaertner and M. Bierwisch (eds) Studia Grammatica 40: The Role of Economy Principles in Linguistic Theory, 170–204 (1996), with permission from Akademie Verlag. Chapter 10, “From being to having: questions about ontology from a Kayne/Szabolcsi syntax,” is reprinted from A. Schwegler, B. Tranel and M. Uribe-Etxebarria (eds) Romance Linguistics: Theoretical Perspectives (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 160), 283–306 (1998), with permission from John Benjamins. Chapter 11, “Two types of small clauses: Toward a syntax of theme/rheme relations,” with Eduardo Raposo, is reprinted from A. Cardinaletti and M. T. Guasti (eds) Syntax and Semantics, Volume 28: Small Clauses, 179–206 (1995), with permission from Academic Press. Chapter 12, “A note on rigidity,” is reprinted from A. Alexiadou and C. Wilder (eds) Possessors, Predicates and Movement in the Determiner Phrase (Linguistics Today 22), 361–82 (1998), with permission from John Benjamins. Chapter 15, “Warps: Some thoughts on categorization,” is reprinted from Theoretical Linguistics 25:1, 31–73 (1999), with permission from Walter de Gruyter.

x

1 INTRODUCTION

This book is called Derivations for two reasons. First, the work is largely derivative, especially on the research of Noam Chomsky. To some extent that describes the work of most generative linguists, but mine derives also from work by others – notably, Howard Lasnik, my teacher, Richard Kayne and James Higginbotham – in pretty much the way a composer’s resumé presents variations on great pieces by the classical masters. I have no problem playing second (or nth) ﬁddle to these people, among other things because this allows me to perform at a level that I would otherwise never achieve, and that is both fun and (for me at least) useful. This is all to be honest with the reader who may dislike the research of these linguists; mine will follow suit. Hopefully the correlation also works in the opposite direction. The second reason I call the book Derivations is more technical, and inasmuch as the term is often seen as opposing “representation,” it needs some explanation.

1 The notion of “representation” in linguistics and elsewhere The word “representation” is used in at least two different senses. A technical use, which I will write in bold in this introduction, is common in linguistics; a more general one, in philosophy. Although these uses are somewhat connected, they must be kept apart in principle. The linguistic notion of representation is inherited from the tradition of concatenation algebras that gave rise to generative grammar. A level of representation must include: (1) Level of representation iii. a vocabulary of symbols iii. a procedure to form associations among symbols iii. a class of acceptable formal objects that the particular level admits iv. a uniﬁcation procedure iv. a procedure to map different levels among themselves. Examples of (i) are nouns or verbs at one level, consonants or vowels at another, and so on. Concatenation, or some looser association instantiates (ii). 1

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Instances of (iii) are valid phrases, valid syllables and so on. The idea that a sentence must have a subject and a predicate, or whatever uniﬁes words, are good examples of uniﬁcation as in (iv). Finally, the traditional mapping of S-structure from D-structure in the Standard System illustrates the role of (v). The notions so deﬁned are called levels of representation, and not just “levels,” because the way in which one level relates to the next is through a particular relation called “representation,” or “rho” in shorthand. This notion is actually more familiar to linguists in its “is-a” guise, the converse of “rho.” The way a level of representation is structured is through its “is-a” relations with regard to objects of the next level. For example, we can take words as output objects of a morpho-phonemic level of representation and ask how these objects relate to the next level up, that of phrases. Clearly we want to say that, in the sentence John loves Mary, for instance loves Mary is a VP, whereas that relation is not deﬁned for John loves. Identically, VP “rhos” or represents loves Mary. In comparable ways we would have said that Mary represents [m] [ae] [r] [i], and similarly for other relevant pieces of information in the syntactic object (e.g. a “chain,” or set of phrase-markers linked via the movement transformation, could in these terms be said to “rho” its links or component parts). A full characterization of representations is what the linguistics program is ultimately about, and the hypothesis that the language faculty is organized in terms of these particular layers of distinctive structure is obviously substantive. Indeed, it is not necessary to characterize linguistic knowledge in these particular terms. In particular, it is possible that linguistic stuff does not cohere into particular layers of structure with the characteristics just outlined. Instead of it being organized in terms of relevant notions of the form in (iii) above, uniﬁed as in (iv), and mapped to the next layer as in (v), it could well be that linguistic information is scattered around a dynamic computational procedure, with no such thing as speciﬁc objects and operations of the form in (iii) ever arising in the uniﬁed terms in (iv) – thus with no overall mapping of the sort implied in (v). Or to go to the other extreme: perhaps there is a single level of representation where all relevant formal objects coexist, without there being any sense in declaring that given objects are logically prior to others, thus making at least (v) irrelevant. Linguists speak of “purely representational” systems whenever they are dealing with a formal model which does not have any derivational properties. A derivation, in the linguistic sense, is a ﬁnite sequence of computational steps, with a deﬁnite beginning and a deﬁnite end, which are taken one step at a time according to some pre-established rules. Derivational systems manipulate nonterminal and terminal symbols, according to concrete permissible productions, set in motion through a starting axiom (e.g. S → NP VP). Representations are established between non-terminals and strings of terminals. In this sense, a standard derivational system is partly representational, in fact heavily so if representations cohere into levels as described above, so that Level n-1 precedes Level n, and so on. Right away we must say that there should be no temptation of understanding 2

INTRODUCTION

these dynamic metaphors (“productions set in motion,” “Level n-1 precedes Level n”) in a temporal sense. While such an interpretation has been advanced in the literature, it is by no means necessary: it is possible, I would even say desirable, to understand each rule application as a timeless logical process, as a matter of separating the linguistic competence of a speaker from how it is put to use in a given environment. A purely representational system lacks all of that computational machinery, and in this sense may stand in a super-case relation with regards to a derivational system (although not all such systems do). The way to characterize a purely representational system is through formal axioms of some sort or another, which determine, in the form of admissibility conditions, which particular set-theoretic objects are recognized as valid formal objects. Of course, a derivational system is that too, but what counts as admissible in that system is what conforms to the computational pattern sketched above. In contrast to all that technical talk of representations, the word “represent” is given a dozen or so entries in good dictionaries, the primary ones revolving around the notions of “portraying” or “embodying” something. These uses have given rise to classical philosophical concerns over the ultimate reference of symbols. For instance the name “Jack Kennedy” is said to represent the President of the US assassinated in 1963 (ideally one should now be looking at the man himself). Moreover, a slightly more exotic use of “represent” (listed by Webster’s dictionary as “rare”) is more pertinent to a recent philosophical tradition: “to bring before the mind, come to understand.” This is the leitmotiv behind the “representational theory of mind,” which in the works of Jerry Fodor and others has used the metaphor of the Turing machine and its computational representation as a model for mind in general. Both of those philosophical uses have some bearing on linguistics. The classical understanding of “representation” is relevant to many semantic theories, for instance. This notion is entirely at right angles with everything I have to say in this book, even those chapters where reference is discussed. Only rabidly anti-mentalist theories of reference would be incompatible with the rather abstract semantic proposals in this book, and I have nothing to contribute to this topic one way or the other. The modern philosophical understanding of “representation” is only a bit more pertinent to the ideas in the foregoing pages. Philologically, the term representation in concatenation algebras was probably borrowed from a philosophical use, although the moment that the notion “rho” is given its technical meaning, philology becomes a curiosity. Similarly, the notion “work” in physics may have its origins in British labor relations, but this matters very little to calculation in joules. Then again, I certainly provide in these pages an account of such technical linguistic notions as “command,” “Case,” “agreement,” or even “noun” and “verb.” The philosopher concerned with the representational theory of mind may be interested in whether notions of that ilk are represented somewhere, in the sense that they are “brought (in some form) before the mind” as one 3

DERIVATIONS

“comes to understand” them (in some form, also). Of course, both derivational and representational systems in principle face this sort of question; the fact that the latter are called “representational” does not make them more or less so in philosophical terms, vis-à-vis derivational alternatives. I ought to clarify right away that – respectable though the philosophical question may be – I do not think that linguistic symbols and procedures have too much to add to its elucidation. I say this because I doubt that VP, or the ﬁrst segment [m] in Mary, or any such element, represents (in the philosophical understanding of the term) a phrase or a consonant or whatever. There is no serious sense – at least no linguistic sense I can think of – that VP or [m] (or for that matter whatever those shorthands boil down to, things like [consonant, nasal, etc.]) “bring before the mind” a given phrase or consonant, or one “comes to understand” those elements as a result of VP or [m]. In fact, so far as I can see those elements themselves are (they do not represent) a given phrase or a given consonant. One can, even ought to, ask what it means for VP or [m], etc. to be linguistic objects. There is a non-trivial question about what it means for those objects to be mental, which I return to in passing in the next section. But it is not clear to me how involving the extra representational assumption does anything toward clarifying this very difﬁcult issue. I suppose that, ultimately, objects like these reduce to energy patterns of some sort, but only because in this sense everything else does – including (literally) the shapes of our various organs or the way in which our immune system operates. Needless to say, claiming that these things are (complex) energy patterns says nothing very deep, given the gap that exists between our understanding of energy patterns and the way organs, systems, mind and so on, come out. But by the same standards, claiming that VP, [m] and so on, represent something or other, given our present level of understanding, amounts to adding a claim about linguistic reality without much empirical basis, so far as I can tell.

2 Five differences between derivational and representational systems In this book I try to navigate mainly the derivational ocean, to ﬁnd out what would count as a (minimalist) explanation from that perspective, and what general properties we expect the language faculty to have under those circumstances. Others study representational alternatives, and hopefully we will eventually ﬁnd out, with the attained knowledge, how to decide on whether one alternative is superior; they are irreducible yet both necessary, or something deeper is common to both. I want to state in this introduction, though, what I take to be the main predictions of each sort of system, and what general theoretical moves favor one or the other take, as best as I understand them. It ought to be insisted on at this point that, since there is no temporal claim being made in any of the discussion above, it would be fallacious to distinguish a dynamic derivational system from a static representational one in terms of 4

INTRODUCTION

whether or not the mind/brain acts dynamically or statically in performance. Under current understanding of all these notions (especially whether the mind/brain acts dynamically, statically, or in some mixed, or deeper way) speculations in this respect seem senseless. As I said, derivational systems may be sub-cases of many representational systems, though this is not necessary. A purely representational system is one whose ﬁltering conditions simply cannot be expressed as internally motivated derivational steps. Optimality Theory (OT) is one such system. Traditional (Paninian) rule-based systems work on input structures to generate, in a stepwise fashion, appropriate output structures. OT theorists question this mode of operation, arguing that many grammatical forms cannot be generated in this way with both an appropriate level of explanatory adequacy and lack of internal paradoxes for the computational system. Typically, paradoxical situations arise if computational rules R1 and R2 are logically ordered, but the only way one could generate (grammatical) object O is by applying R1, then R2 and then R1 again, to the very same object. In contrast, this sort of situation is not particularly problematic for OT systems, which work on abstract, input set-theoretic objects which get ﬁltered by the system in terms of violable (soft) output constraints ranked in various fashions, in much the same way as standard connectionist networks proceed. This constitutes the ﬁrst difference of a serious sort between derivational and representational systems. Note that this difference can push matters in the derivational direction also. For instance, imagine that object O must a fortiori be described as involving rule ordering, as in some sense rule R1 has the effect of destroying the context for another instance of this rule to apply, so that only R2 can apply next. If such a situation arises, the emerging ordering may not be describable in purely representational terms, as it may well be that some crucial information that was present in the course of the derivation disappears by the end of it, and is not recoverable. In any case, both of these formal circumstances, one showing a representational bias and the other a derivational one, have to be qualiﬁed in terms of at least two things. One is the possibility that there should always be a representational residue (e.g. a copy trace) of any rule application, in which case strictly speaking no rule would entirely destroy the context for its own later application, or that of another rule, if the residue is fully informative. Second, the object O where rules R1 and R2 apply may be structured in two “cycles” C1 and C2 (i.e. C2[… C1[…]…]), so that rules R1 and R2 apply within C1, and next R1 applies again at C2. As will be clear throughout, motivating cyclic domains is a central topic of this book. Purely derivational systems expect ultimately no stability points of the representational sort, whereby a set of representations can be adequately uniﬁed into a particular level. For example, in the transition from the Government and Binding (GB) model to minimalism, D-structure as a level of representation vanished, for empirical reasons. As a result, the system could intersperse D-structure-like objects (phrases) with S-structure-like objects (chains), in a 5

DERIVATIONS

strictly cyclic fashion. Whereas in any Extended Standard version of the system one would ﬁrst complete D-structure and then go back down the phrase-marker to start generating transformations, minimalism does both things simultaneously, relying on economy principles to decide on which sort of step comes ﬁrst. In that sense, minimalism is obviously less representational than GB, although standard minimalism (if there is such a thing) still retains representational residues in LF or PF, levels of representation in the sense above. Some researchers, myself included, have been exploring the possibility that this sort of residue is unnecessary too, and the entire model can be purely cyclic, with no proper levels. We say that a derivation converges at a level of representation like PF or LF if it meets whatever legibility conditions these levels impose; otherwise it crashes. This is the principle of Full Interpretation, demanding the legibility of syntactic representations. In its most radical version, a purely derivationalist system with no levels of representation should not have a coherent notion of convergence as such, and thus not obey the legibility conditions of Full Interpretation. This is neither good nor bad a priori: it depends on whether the system itself actually generates all and only the sorts of objects that convergence/ legibility is supposed to sanction. The focus of the system, and the resources, are different, however. Thus a partly representational system can generate object O and then ask: “Does O converge according to Full Interpretation (is O legible)?” The ﬁltering effect of a negative answer is lost in a purely derivational system: the syntactic procedure itself has to come out with the grammatical output, for there is no intermediate representational point for the system to stop and evaluate the representations achieved, proceeding onwards with only the grammatical ones in terms of what is legible to the next component of the system. We can illustrate that point in terms of various familiar notions; for instance, a chain C understood as a set of (characteristically connected) phrase-markers K and L, that is: {K, L}. (2) [K…[…L…]…]… Chain C {K, L} movement For a pure representationalist this is a formal object obeying certain general adequacy conditions (of command, uniformity and locality among its links, for example). In contrast, the derivationalist must take a chain as nothing but the adequate – obeying command, uniformity, locality – derivational history of a computational procedure: say, movement (again, “history” having no temporal connotations). The emphasis for the representationalist is on a (complex) symbol, whereas for a derivationalist it is on a (complex) mechanism, which constitutes the second difference of a serious sort among the systems. At this point it is appropriate to raise a potential issue with regards to the philosophical notion of representation. A philosopher may be interested in whether representing symbols is more or less troubling than representing 6

INTRODUCTION

mechanisms. If the issue of representations is scientiﬁcally sound, a symbol would seem like an a priori candidate for a representation (in the Webster deﬁnition a symbol is “something which represents or typiﬁes another thing, quality, etc.”). In contrast, a mechanism (in the Webster sense, “the working parts of a machine collectively”) need not be a priori representational, and it could be as dull – though “clever” as well – as the immune or the motor systems appear to be. For what it is worth, one can certainly give a derivational account of obviously non-symbolic systems: computational biology has scores of examples of just that sort, where talk of representations, in the philosophical sense at least, would be utterly beside the point. It is hard to turn that into an argument for derivational systems for two reasons. First of all, it is not obvious that the philosophical issue, as presently formulated, has a real scientiﬁc status. A representationalist could rightly defend this view by saying that no one has a clear picture of what it means to be a symbol, and hence whether a symbol needs to be mentally represented any more or less than a (mental) mechanism does. And as for the fact that several computational accounts exist of processes in the natural world which invoke no representations, the representationalist could dismiss their signiﬁcance to present concerns by claiming that they are just using the computational mechanism as a modeling tool, whereas a derivationalist assigns this mechanism an ontological status of some sort which, when push comes to shove, ought to be represented as much (or little) as symbols are. Second, even for radically derivational systems which reduce everything to mechanisms, use of symbols at some level is not eliminable, at least in principle. It is for instance possible that the grammar generates some object according to its purely internal procedures, but the object in question simply cannot be interpreted by the interface components of the system. Strictly, this sort of object would not violate legibility conditions as such, as there are none in this extreme view; but it would not be intelligible. Intelligibility is an extra-syntactic notion, perhaps even a performative one – though not because of that a notion that one can shy away from. Conditions against vacuous quantiﬁcation, for example, ruling out an illicit sentence like Who does John love Mary?, are very possibly of this sort; they may well have a say on whether otherwise grammatical structures, generated by standard derivational procedures, are judged acceptable by native speakers. If so, sooner or later all systems out there, be they derivational or representational, have to hit on symbols, which is the representational issue raised in these paragraphs. The role that symbolic elements play on one’s system may not decide its representational nature, but nonetheless have a bearing on the system’s internal shape. At stake ought to be how the system bottoms out. Symbols are arbitrary, and one must a fortiori admit either one of two things regarding prime symbols: (i) the primes that the systemic apparatus arranges in this or that fashion are completely random and could have been other elements; or (ii) there is a sub-system that predicts the properties of those primes. Of course, if (ii) obtains, one would want to understand the nature of that sub-system, and then a 7

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slippery-slope kind of argument suggests itself: the sub-system will also have to bottom-out, and the same puzzle arises all over again. Nonetheless, in principle a purely derivational system can at least pursue a type (ii) approach in meaningful ways, in much the same way that one does in a science like physics, where objects at some level are interactive processes at another – and the slipperyslope concern is basically set aside. In contrast, a representational system, by its very nature, has fewer scruples with a type (i) approach. The important thing in this general view is to establish the axioms that govern the interactions among given primes, and the exact nature of these symbols is admittedly immaterial. To be sure, this difference does not, in itself, distinguish between the two perspectives: it will depend on how reality turns out to be, whether prime symbols out there are more or less random or can be successfully modeled as having internal computational properties. In any case, in principle this constitutes a third difference between the two sorts of systems. We have seen above how, for both theoretical and empirical reasons, a derivational system may need to have cyclic characteristics. To repeat, a system without levels of representation ought to capture whatever properties these levels were designed to code in terms of cyclic application of processes; in turn, to address otherwise serious internal paradoxes with rule ordering, a derivational system may need to ﬁx a given order of rule-application (for instance in terms of complexity) and then whenever that order seems to be violated, invoke a new cycle. Given this cyclic nature of the system, it is worth asking, also, whether cycles cut computational complexity, and whether this is a desirable property for grammars to have. If it is, this may turn into an argument for a derivational system. Naturally, concerns regarding computational complexity (as opposed to other sorts of elegance) should be immaterial in a representational system. This is a fourth difference between the systems. The possibility that computational complexity is relevant to the appropriate modeling of linguistic phenomena turns out to be a very difﬁcult premise to establish in purely formal terms. Once again, one should not confuse the computational complexity that arises, normally in some mathematical limit, for a system of use (a performance matter) with whether complexity determines the design of the system of knowledge (a consideration about competence). Suppose one were to show that, as a class of alternative derivational objects that enters a computation grows, one cannot reach a computational decision about the optimality of the chosen derivation in polynomial time, or even in realistic time. Even if this were the case, it tells us little about the system of knowledge, just as problems with, say, center embedding do which make memory resources blow up. Speakers would simply use whichever chunks of structure work, not going into limiting situations, just as they avoid center embedding. Nonetheless, there are potential empirical advantages to proceeding with the desire to avoid computational complexity. Trivially, a system without levels of representation faces no need to treat unlimitedly large representations as units where dependencies can in principle hold. In turn, if a procedure is found for breaking down representations into minimal blocks, and these turn out to be 8

INTRODUCTION

natural domains for syntactic processes to take place, then an argument for the derivational system is at hand. Conversely, if there are syntactic dependencies which are established across computationally deﬁned cyclic domains, that would be an argument for a representational system. Aside from the four differences I have sketched above between the two systems, all of which can be found in the specialized literature, there is a ﬁfth difference, which to the best of my knowledge has not been seriously discussed. Consider the matter of glitches or imperfections in a system. A representational model has the formal structure of a logical ediﬁce obeying eternal axioms; an error in such a system should constitute the end of the game. Computational systems, however, are less pristine, as familiar bugs in our personal computers readily attest. A computational glitch need not halt a program, which may ﬁnd ways around it and even beneﬁt (very rarely) from particular bugs. Once again, this is a priori neither good nor bad for modeling the linguistic system. It will depend on how it pans out, empirically. For the most part, I will have relatively little to say about this last difference, but it is something to keep in mind in principle, particularly as linguists discuss to what extent the language faculty obeys properties of design optimality, itself a purely empirical matter. In sum, these are the serious differences existing between each sort of system: (3) The ﬁrst difference: The role of ordering The second difference: The presence of symbols vs. procedures The third difference: The role of prime architecture The fourth difference: The role of computational complexity The ﬁfth difference: The presence of glitches

3 Symbols vs. procedures Chomsky’s derivational version of the Minimalist Program (MP) addresses theoretical and empirical worries with Deep and Surface-structures by denying the existence of these particular levels. If the grammar is an optimal interface with outside systems, only the latter will determine the actual levels of representation; this rules out the model-internal S-structure. In turn, the interface levels are supposed to be (virtually) conceptually necessary. Although it is unclear how this rules out D-structure (the lexicon could in principle introduce an interface with a conceptual system), empirical arguments exist against D-structure as a level of representation in the technical meaning above (see e.g. Chomsky 1995b: 188, reporting on an argument by Lasnik based on an example by Kevin Kearney). Epstein and his associates have explored the possibility that no particular level of representation is part of the system – not even LF or PF. This book, among other things, considers the conditions that the model should have in order to fulﬁll that sort of goal. Note that failing to meet any of the ﬁve deﬁning conditions in Section 1 would sufﬁce for an object not to count as a level of 9

DERIVATIONS

representation. Possibly, MP does not need (v), given assumptions about interface optimality (i.e. if there is only PF and LF, and they do not feed one another). (iv) is also unnecessary if a formal uniﬁcation is achieved in performance, a perfectly reasonable possibility. For example a subject and a predicate would unite to form a proposition only when (Fregean) interpretation demands arise, after LF. Of course, (i) through (iii) above constitute the substantive content of each representational bit in the system (what distinguishes, say, phonology from semantics). While discussing the representational nature of these elements is central to this book, it is nonetheless clear that meeting those conditions need not be done in terms of a level of representation: those can be just properties of whatever formal objects derivations work with. Consider in that respect Chomsky’s “bare Phrase-structure” (BPS) project, adapted from earlier work by Muyskens. This thesis takes minimal and maximal projections as initial or end states of (non-vacuous) merger processes. Although they are real representational objects in the system (for instance in determining uniform chains), levels of projection are thus not primitive, and in fact they change as the derivation unfolds (e.g. X prior to and after merge, from a maximal to intermediate projection status). Epstein’s general approach to command can be interpreted in a similar vein: while this notion is real in that it determines a host of representational properties, command from X to Y is nothing but a reﬂex of whether X and Y are introduced in the same derivational workspace. Whether X commands Y depends only on whether there happens to emerge a K containing Y that immediately contains X; that situation will arise only if there is no separate, as it were stable, L that X is part of. The Multiple Spell-Out (MSO) idea, a central topic of this book, was proposed in that spirit. Assume a version of Kayne’s Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA) compatible with Chomsky’s BPS: (4) a. Base: If X commands Y then X precedes Y. b. Induction: If X precedes Y and X dominates Z, then Z precedes Y. In minimalist terms (4) should either follow (from “virtual” conceptual necessity, including economy considerations in this rubric) or be a consequence of interface conditions. Assume furthermore that linearization is a PF demand. (4a) can be deduced as one optimal solution to that interface need, given preexisting merged objects (see Chapter 3). However, (1b) does not follow from anything, so the question is whether it can be eliminated. MSO suggests that it can, if Spell-out is taken to be a mere rule applying as many times as necessary up to convergence (within economy limits). In the MSO system, natural “cascades” of structure emerge every time the derivation encounters a non-complement. Thus these units are predicted to be substantively employed, for instance in: (5) a. A deﬁnition of “command” (relevant wherever it is employed, e.g. “distance”). b. Focus projections in PF. 10

INTRODUCTION

c. Scope, etc. at LF. d. CED (and other complement/non-complement) effects in the derivation. The latter follow if Spell-out “ﬂattens” structure, converting an array of embedded sets (a phrase-marker) into a string of items which can be read as ultimately phonetic symbols. That string is no longer a syntactic object, hence it disallows operations within it (the “impenetrability” of cascades is thus deduced; see Chapters 3, 4 and 5 on this). Conversely, phenomena not amenable to the “cascade” pattern cannot be accounted for within the limits of the narrow computation (in a standard bottom-up fashion); for instance in: (6) a. b. c. d.

Anti-command effects. Liaison and other across cascade effects in PF. Antecedence effects at LF. Combinations of these (e.g. Weak cross-over, including anticommand and novelty).

Within this system, what are notions such as agreement (concord) or Case? Agreement may just be an “address system” to unify separate cascades (this would explain why it does not arise for head-complement relations, part of the same cascade; see Chapters 3 and 5). Case may be a mark of syntactic distinctness for identical lexical types, which would otherwise collapse into one another (see Chapter 8). Observe, for instance: (7) DP V DP

(e.g. He hit he.)

How does the grammar tell the “ﬁrst” DP from the “second” in order to operate with them? By hypothesis (structure dependency) the grammar cannot use “ﬁrst” and “second” notions. It may use syntactic context as token identiﬁcation, but what happens prior to merge (in the numeration, a set of tokens) or after merged units collapse into PF strings (at the point of uniﬁcation of separately spelled-out cascades)? There is no syntactic context in those instances, and Case may be seen as a conﬁgurational coding: e.g. “nominative” sister to T projection, etc. Apparently this phenomenon (distinct Case valuation) only happens locally; not across separate cascades, for instance. That is expected if it is locally (within cascades) that Case values are important. Aside from descriptive consequences, that approach has indirect consequences if coupled with assumptions about a narrow mapping into the semantics, a broad minimalistic assumption: (8) Transparency Thesis Semantic relations arise from computationally established syntactic relations. Then, all other things being equal, (10) should hold (a central theme of Chapter 8): 11

DERIVATIONS

(9) Semantic interpretation of DP dependency (binding, control, licensing) is under command. (10) Elements marked for syntactic distinctness (e.g. through Case value) are interpreted as semantically distinct (not co-referent or co-variant), a local obviation effect. Clearly, then, the general derivational dynamics of MSO have important representational consequences. One of the main goals of this book is to substantiate this general point.

4 Computational complexity A different kind of argument for a derivational approach is based on the possibility that computational complexity is relevant to the appropriate modeling of linguistic phenomena. Chomsky has made that argument central to his last couple of papers. MSO shares those papers’ characteristic of cutting down computational complexity, although it arises for different reasons there. For Chomsky the issue emerges technically – as a way to cyclically eliminating unwanted features – and is taken to be primitive: the desire to cut computational complexity makes the system assume a proviso about “phases” in the computation. As we saw in the previous section, for MSO the issue arose as an attempt to deduce Kayne’s LCA from computational dynamics. Thus, although cyclic Spell-out does cut down computational complexity, that does not motivate its presence within the system – convergence does. Another difference between Chomsky’s system of phases and MSO is in the status of “impenetrability.” Since Chomsky’s phases are stipulated (in terms of complexity avoidance) he can stipulate, further, whether these are transparent domains, and if so under what circumstances (e.g. at the “edge”). But MSO cascades (in Chapters 3, 4, and 8) are theorematic, hence cannot be tampered with. Adding to or subtracting from cascades would have to be done by way of manipulating the reasoning that yields them as side-effects. Three other chapters dealing with “impenetrability” are 4, 6 and 7, the latter two collaborations with Hornstein and Castillo. All these pieces have as a sideeffect the emergence of cyclic domains with island properties (across agreeing subjects, at LF and successive-cyclically, respectively). But it is important to note that in all these instances a barrier for an operation (and hence a cycle of sorts) arises because of derivational properties, not just in order to cut derivational complexity, although of course that is a consequence as well.

5 Ordering We have examined syntactic notions that either make no obvious representational sense (Why should speciﬁers, and not complements, agree? Why should arguments, and not predicates, host Case differences?) or are as natural as representational alternatives that do not arise (Why are dependencies under 12

INTRODUCTION

command, and not anti-command?). But there are also notions that either seem as natural as derivational alternatives that do not arise, or make no obvious derivational sense. Among the former, consider the second argument of a binary quantiﬁer, as in (11e): (11) a. John likes most children. b. [[most children] [John likes ____]] c. The size of the intersection of the set of children and the set of entities that John likes is larger than half the set of children. d. most children set of children e. most John likes set of entities that John likes While it is clear what sort of derivational syntax relates most and its ﬁrst argument, children, what kind of relation exists between the terms of “” in (11e)? As Chapter 6 shows, even if we do QR, that question has no obvious answer: (12) [XP [DPmost children] … [YP John likes t]] Whatever we say XP and YP are, John likes t is not in construction with most or its projections. Familiar modes of argument taking are as seen in (13), which can be deduced derivationally: (13) a. Head-complement relations (merge of head to maximal projection). b. Head-speciﬁer relations (merge of two maximal projections). (13a) is used for direct, internal arguments whereas (13b) is for indirect, external arguments, in both instances as seems natural: internal arguments within head projection, external arguments without, but still merging. Semantically, we want John likes t to be the external argument (thus the speciﬁer) of most but it is not even a sister to the determiner, let alone its speciﬁer. We can stipulate some new, non-derivational speciﬁcation to indicate that John likes t is the external argument of most. For instance, assuming standard QR: (14) If (at LF) quantiﬁer X is immediately contained within Y, then Y is X’s external argument. But we should ask ourselves why (14) holds, and not (15) (or more radical alternatives): (15) a. If (at LF) quantiﬁer X is (immediately) dominated by Y, then [same as (14)]. b. If [same as (14)], then Y is X’s internal argument. Representationally, (15) seems no more or less elegant than (14). Which makes one wonder whether QR plus (14) is the right way to go, since nothing requires it. A derivationalist ought to worry and try to address these serious difﬁculties. Ideally, this should be done in such a way that leaves no room for doubt: with 13

DERIVATIONS

the certainty that the solution is not “patch-work,” with the possibility that it cannot be replicated in natural representational terms. For the latter, the best situation is based on systemic characteristics that are best expressed in purely computational terms; this should be so in such radical conditions that the output of the computational procedure cannot reproduce the input, which is like saying that some information gets lost along the way. It is hard to ﬁnd relevant examples of “loss of information,” among other things because, on the average, linguistic processes are highly conservative. Familiar constraints on the recoverability of deletion operations, or what Chomsky calls the “inclusiveness” of derivations (no features can be added to a computation if they were not part of the input), can obviously be expressed in terms of some sort of Law of the Conservation of Patterns (see Chapters 8 and 15). That same law, however, normally prevents us from teasing apart a computational and a representational approach. At the same time, there may be places where the law does not hold, just as there are points in the universe where some physical conservation laws come into question (e.g. black holes or the early universe). One such point might involve the creation of a linguistic object which is possible only after some other, deﬁnably simpler computational object has been achieved. Although in other circumstances the “simpler” object can surface, in the concrete construction in point such an object would be a mere computational state with no representational consequence. One relevant example is provided by the analysis of binary quantiﬁcational expressions based on the notion reprojection, as discussed in Chapter 6. This is a sort of formal entity which changes its label in mid derivation, in such a way that the original label could only be recovered by positing dual representations. For a sentence like most people love children Hornstein and I argue that the unit most people – the speciﬁer of IP early in the derivation – literally takes I as its own speciﬁer at a later stage, resulting in a sort of giant DP, of which people is the complement and the rest of the structure in the sentence is the speciﬁer. This provides a natural syntax for binary quantiﬁcation, and as I mentioned turns out to also predict peculiar islands that arise late in the derivation (a relation across a reprojected binary quantiﬁer would be akin to a relation across a non-complement in the LF component, thus generally barred). A representational version of this sort of analysis, based on the dual nature of quantiﬁers (they are both arguments at some level and predicates at a further, derived level), seems more unnatural, in that it must postulate some artifact to account for the lost information. A further issue that arises with regards to rule ordering is why successivecyclic processes exist. Suppose that for some reason of the sort discussed above, linguistic objects are structured in cycles C2 [. . . C1 [. . .]. . .], which happen to be impenetrable. How then do we ever manage long-distance relations? The minimalist answers I am familiar with are stipulative: they either deny successivecyclicity or they code it through some technical, “peripheral” feature which happens to drive the computation to intermediate stages. It is, of course, per14

INTRODUCTION

fectly conceivable that the system may have come out with a different alternative: the impossibility of long-distance movement altogether. While that appears to be the case in some languages for some constructions (e.g. whmovement), most familiar languages allow unbounded extractions. In Chapter 7, Castillo and I suggest a very different take on this matter, based on an idea from Tree-Adjoining Grammars: in effect there is no longdistance wh-movement. What happens in unbounded movements is that the “intervening” structure gets successively merged in “tuck-in” fashion, between a moved wh-phrase and the rest of the structure. This eliminates artiﬁcial features, and raises the possibility that merger need not extend a phrase-marker at the root. Successive-cyclic effects arise in terms of the kinds of complementizers that can be successively tucked-in. If a language allows for non-identical complementizers for declaratives and questions, then a successive-cyclic effect will arise. In contrast, a language with identical complementizers for both sorts of clause types, or a situation whereby a wh-element is trying to move across another wh-element, will result in an impossible merge as the merging items collapse into one another under identity (see Chapter 8). This amounts to an island effect. From a representational perspective, it is not entirely clear why the phenomenon of successive-cyclicity should exist, or why there should be variations among languages in this respect. Needless to say, one can code relevant properties of the shape of chains, but it is very strange that in language A wh-chains should be possible across wh-islands, while in language B only across bridgeverbs, while still in language C relevant chains should be sanctioned only when strictly local.

6 Prime architecture: relational terms But to carry a derivational program through one cannot stop at showing how some representational notions are best seen as derivational consequences. One has to pull the trick for all such notions, or the system is still (partially) representational. The hardest problem turns out to be with such notions as V or N, which cannot be blamed on the properties of syntagmatic or “horizontal” syntax, as these are paradigmatic or “vertical” notions, which standard derivational systems are not designed to care about: in traditional derivational terms, it makes no difference whether we are manipulating V or N, or for that matter any of the ones and zeroes of a binary code. Of course, one can try to apply some horizontal syntax to such atomic-looking elements as V or N, which is what the generative semanticists did in the late 1960s. That project, in the limit, leads to the denial of autonomous syntax, making it a superﬂuous, basically emergent object between thought and surface linguistic representation. For both empirical and philosophical reasons I agree with those atomists that take that project to be misguided. Empirically, it still seems to be the case, as was some thirty years ago, that sub-lexical stuff does not have the characteristic productivity, systematicity and transparency of supra-lexical 15

DERIVATIONS

combination; plus it obeys other sorts of restrictions involving the canonicity of given expressions or predictable gaps in paradigms (the notion “paradigm” makes sense only in this domain). In a deeper conceptual sense one does not really want to split the lexical atom, if only because what to do next is not altogether clear, particularly if one’s view of semantics is as constrained as sketched in the Transparency Thesis above. But then derivationalists seem to be cornered into an irreducible position: they cannot explore a standard syntactic approach to sub-lexical stuff, short of falling into a version of generative semantics; yet if they do not, they hit a bedrock representational tier of the language faculty. I am clearer about the puzzle than about its possible solutions. The one I attempt here springs from two sources, one more directly relevant than the other. I became seriously concerned with lexical relations when coming to the (I think) surprising realization that so-called relational terms cannot be conﬁned to a handful of peculiar elements in the lexicon which behave at the same time as objects and as concepts – things like brother and the like. The usual treatment for these creatures is to assume they involve two different variables, one relational and the other referential. If the referential one is used we can then come up with expressions like the Marx brothers, which is much like the Marx guys; but if the relational variable is used, then we are allowed predicative expressions like Groucho is Chico’s brother. In possessive guise both of these aspects are present at the same time, as in Groucho has a brother. The latter is important, if only because much serious syntactic work has gone, during the last decade, into this kind of syntax, after Kayne brought to the fore some interesting ideas of Anna Szabolcsi’s from the early 1980s (see Chapter 10 on these issues). The Kayne/Szabolcsi program sought, in essence, to explore the parallelisms existing between nominal and clausal structure, both syntactically and semantically. As such, parallelisms are neither here nor there; nonetheless, if carried to the limit this general idea may point toward the possibility that what looks like stable syntactic objects, nouns, in some instances at least, may encompass some basic conceptual relation. That could be anecdotal (the view that this, in the end, only happens for “relational” terms) or systematic; in the latter instance, surely it would have some relevance for the matter of a putative decomposition of core lexical spaces. After all, the “ur” lexical space is the noun (one can always think of verbs as relational, necessarily involving arguments which, in the end, bottom out as nominal). If that “ur” space can be relational, then it is not atomic, at least not necessarily so. Working with Hornstein and Rosen, it became clear that relational terms are very common, particularly if we extend our observations in terms of a Kayne/Szabolcsi syntax to part-whole relations (the content of Chapter 9). In short, all concrete nouns (most of those in the lexicon) are either part of something or whole to something else; indeed, often these relations are possible in both directions (e.g. a city contains neighborhoods but is part of a nation). Crucially, the relevant expressions (of the sort in My car has a Ford T engine) are so 16

INTRODUCTION

common and predictable that it would be pointless to list their relational properties as lexical idiosyncrasies. What is more, after a serious syntactic analysis, it becomes obvious that not all logically possible “possessive” relations ﬁnd an expression in syntactic terms. For instance, together with (16a) we ﬁnd (16b), as the Kayne/Szabolcsi syntax would lead us to predict if appropriately extended to these sorts of expressions. But together with (17a) we do not ﬁnd (17b): (16) a. the poor neighborhoods of the city b. the city’s poor neighborhoods (17) a. a city of poor neighborhoods b. *the poor neighborhoods’ city Chapter 10 shows how this can be predicted, assuming a rich syntactic system, in terms having to do with the locality of movement (while movement of the city in (16b), from a base position to its speciﬁer site, can be local, movement of the poor neighborhoods in (17b) is not). From the point of view of these relations being purely lexical, this gap in the paradigm makes no sense. If syntax aptly predicts some of these phenomena, it becomes legitimate to explore them syntactically, perhaps without committing to too many hostages regarding the general details of this syntactic apparatus. In the end, what is needed comes down to a small-clause, or basic predication. From a NeoDavidsonian perspective of the sort advocated by Higginbotham – which builds all semantic relations around basic predications – this is arguably a welcome step. Although I must admit that there is nothing traditional about these sorts of predications, which involve such nightmares as “material constitution” (e.g. this ring is/has gold) and appropriately cumbersome versions of these notions in what one may think as “formal” terms (e.g. this organization is/has several levels). And to complicate things further, only some of the various combinations of these notions are possible; thus compare: (18) a. A [robust [ninety-pound [calf]]] FORM SUBSTANCE b. (#) A [ninety-pound [robust [calf]]] SUBSTANCE FORM (18b) either adds emphasis on ninety-pound or is very odd; the neutral way to say the expression is as in (18a). Similarly in other languages, where these notions manifest themselves in standard possessive guise, for instance the Spanish (19): (19) a. una ternera de noventa libras de buena presencia a calf of ninety pounds of good looks b. (#) una ternera de buena presencia de noventa libras a calf of good looks of ninety pounds This must mean that there is a certain ordering in the way in which these various relations manifest themselves in syntax, whatever that follows from. 17

DERIVATIONS

The sort of thesis just sketched – that some apparently complex lexical items are best seen as the reﬂex of some standard syntax – is still a fairly traditional syntagmatic proposal. In effect, the idea comes down to taking a characteristic of a noun which is lumped together with other features as one of its paradigmatic properties, and discharging it as some piece of syntax. Chapters 11, 12 and 13, involving small-clauses/partitives, names and propositions, respectively, discuss other such examples of the relevant sort, all analyzed in terms of roughly “possessive” syntax. Of course, these moves, as such, are not entirely unlike those undertaken by generative semanticists. If the moves are constrained, however, to instances where the various dependencies involved manifest themselves in richly syntactic (meaning systematic, productive, transparent) terms, then the atomist need not be worried. He or she can diffuse this potentially troubling instance by admitting that some apparently lexical relations are not that, after all; the same concession is made regarding inﬂectional morphology, without the atomistic thesis being affected. Where the atomist cannot yield is in the idea that syntax, somewhere, eventually stops messing with some lexical items, more or less at the point that speakers stop having strong intuitions and more or less where systematicity, productivity and transparency break down or go away. At the same time, once a “possessive” syntax is in place, in particular, for nominal relations of the syntagmatic sort, we can ask whether that syntax does us any good for nominal relations of the paradigmatic sort, whatever residue of those we are prepared to accept. We have seen some of that already, in (18)/(19). True, these are facts of syntagmatic syntax, inasmuch as we are determining possible combinations among successive words; at the same time, where do we code the appropriate restriction? Should it not be in some paradigmatic cut of, in that instance, a noun like calf which must code “substance” dependents before it codes “formal” ones? That sort of ordering is familiar from other parts of the grammar where dependencies are organized. For example, we know that verbs code “themes” before “agents,” or that auxiliary selection is not random and correlates with aspectual properties of verbs. In a sense these are all vertical cuts of language (corresponding to familiar organizations among lexical spaces, such as the one that has all events implying a state, but not conversely; or a count term implying a mass, but not vice versa). Those are the ones that, if seen in sheer syntagmatic terms, worry the atomist: if we say that an event is analyzed syntagmatically as a state plus some sort of (say, causal) function, or a count term is analyzed syntagmatically as a mass term plus some sort of (say, classiﬁer) function, we have again started the linguistic wars. Be that as it may, though, is there any advantage to thinking that the paradigmatic characteristic of nominal stuff being, for instance, concrete, stands in a kind of predicational relation to that very nominal stuff?

7 Prime architecture: categories We know horizontal syntax to be full of hierarchies, for verbal and nominal ontologies, thematic roles, auxiliaries and so on. Curiously, our normal syntax 18

INTRODUCTION

works without being sensitive to them – they have to be stipulated on the side. What we generally do with these objects is blame them on some outside notion, the structure of either the world or of the extra-linguistic mind. In both my collaborations with Paul Pietroski (Chapter 14), and Chapter 15, it is suggested that ascribing responsibility for the relevant orderings in those domains is unilluminating. We also submit that, at the very least, we should ask ourselves whether that other implicational, thus hierarchical, ediﬁce that we know we are capable of as a species – namely counting – is partly responsible for the observed hierarchies in language. The idea would be that our mind is structured in those “dimensional” terms, and we use that apparatus to construct the structure of linguistic concepts. In this view, if it turns out that, say, events come out as formally more complex than states, or count nouns than mass terms, this would have nothing to do with the structure of the semantic correspondences to these terms. The culprit for this ordering would have to be found in the fact that, for some reason, the syntactic objects (event V vs. state V or count N vs. mass N) align themselves in the dimensional way that the whole and the natural numbers do, for instance. Whatever the merit of this general approach, it would have one immediate consequence: most of the representational apparatus needed to code symbols would reduce to something with the formal status of “0,” the basic prime we need in order to build mathematical concepts. One essentially starts with a nominal formal space corresponding to the “ur” abstract concept (with no particular speciﬁcation about its lexical meaning, at least in syntax), and more complex formal spaces correspond to what amounts to topological folds on this space, which boost its dimensionality to the next level. This yields hierarchies of the sort animate count mass abstract, within the nominal system. In turn verbal systems can be conceived as adding a time dimension in horizontal syntax (verbs, unlike nouns, must have a syntagmatic nature, the combination with their arguments). In particular, a verb can be seen as a dynamic function, the derivative over time of the nominal space of its theme, or internal argument. Drinking a beer, for instance, can be modeled as a kind of function that monitors the beer change in the glass until it no longer exists, which is commonly thought of as the grammatical aspect of this sort of action. In turn verbal spaces can also be “warped” into higher dimensions through the addition of arguments, yielding familiar accomplishment achievement activity state hierarchies. What is derivational and representational in that sort of “warping” system is not easy to tell. Surely something with the notional status of “0” is still representational, but it is no longer clear whether whatever has the notional status of a derivative of a function of arguments like “0” over time need be any more representational than the computation of “command” as we saw above, or any such simple-minded computational entity. I cannot venture any speculations to decide on this interesting question simply because I lack the mathematical, computational or philosophical expertise to do so. My intention is simply to bring the matter to an appropriate level of abstraction, so that the question can be decided, or at least posed, in terms that merit the discussion. 19

DERIVATIONS

This view of things addresses the atomism vs. decomposition conﬂict only in part, as it is a mixed solution. In an ideal world the atomist should rest assured that horizontal syntax does not have to have the properties of vertical syntax. True, in essence I am assuming a sort of very abstract predication “all the way down,” so that whenever we ﬁnd a hierarchy in language of the sort . . . A B C, I am in the end analyzing it as PRED(C) B, PRED(B) A. Although in some languages these very basic predications clearly show up in morphemic, or even lexical guise (classiﬁers, causativizers, etc.), their nature is signiﬁcantly different from that of “normal” predicates like red (x). In this view of things, CLASSIFIER(x), for instance, when applied to whatever codes the extension of a mass term, yields a new kind of formal object: an individual, or classiﬁed extension of mass. And the point that matters to me right now is that this is not a syntagmatic entity, but a paradigmatic one. As to why that difference should translate to lack of productivity, systematicity or transparency of the relevant system, be sensitive to canonicity considerations (ultimately a matter of frequency in standardized use), or for that matter why people should have less solid intuitions about this sub-lexical stuff than supra-lexical stuff, that is anybody’s guess. In turn the decompositionalist, given this general view, should also be satisﬁed with the fact that it allows for all the standard reasons we have to look inside lexical atoms: to capture lexical entailments (or similar relations) and model the structure of languages where given lexical properties show up as morphemes, or separate words. That sort of evidence is totally consistent with the model just sketched, and furthermore constrained by it. As for the representational residue, there is little to say. One can blame it on some pattern of brain activity, or even the interlocking of patterns coming from the various organs that are possibly implicated in “ur” thoughts (in a dimensional system, it is not hard to imagine “talk” across dimensions of different organs without giving up a modularity thesis). Of course, this will not satisfy the philosopher who wants to nail linguists into having to admit some sort of representations, in the philosophical sense. The good news here, I suppose, is that this representation is so far removed from even familiar notions like V or N, that perhaps it should not be all that troubling. It poses a central question about what “thought” is, but not, perhaps, any deeper than that.

8 Organization of the chapters The present book is divided in two main halves: a series of standard (syntagmatic) derivational chapters, and a series of more radical (eventually paradigmatic) derivational chapters. In addition, a conceptual, introductory section sets up those concrete parts in Chapter 2. The introductory section includes a review of the Minimalist Program that appeared in Lingua (107, 1999) and my contribution to a polemic that came out in NLLT (2000 and 2001). I think that these pieces give a substantial presentation of the general derivational approach from a conceptually broad minimalist perspective. The syntagmatic derivations section starts (Chapter 3) with an article written 20

INTRODUCTION

in the mid-1990s, which was published in Epstein and Hornstein (1999), where the MSO system is sketched. Although less conceptual, the paper with Jairo Nunes, which appeared in Syntax (3, 2000), does a better job as Chapter 4 at presenting the technical details of this system. An empirical application to various problems of extraction is discussed in Chapter 5, which appeared in NLLT (17, 1999). The most far-reaching, and also radical ideas within this general framework are discussed in the last paper in this section, Chapter 8, which was published in Wilder, Gaertner and Bierwisch 1996. Two other papers in the same spirit, though with slightly different implications, are collaborations with Hornstein (Chapter 6) and Castillo (Chapter 7), both of which appeared as contributions to UMDWPL (8, in 1999 and 9, in 2000, respectively); they present “reprojections” and a highly derivational account of successive cyclicity, respectively. The paradigmatic derivations part is introduced in Chapter 9 by the collaboration with Hornstein and Rosen, which came out as a WCCFL presentation and, in an expanded fashion, in UMDWPL (2, 1994) – the version included here. Next is a conceptual, thus broader, piece that came out in Schwegler, Tranel and Uribe-Etxebarria (1998); the main ideas concerning the syntax of possession, as well as what it may entail for the larger concerns mentioned above, are sketched in this Chapter 10. Papers on names and rigidity matters (Chapter 12, which appeared in Alexiadou and Wilder 1998) and two other coauthored works on small-clauses (with Raposo, from Cardinaletti and Guasti 1995, Chapter 11) and parataxis (with Torrego, given as a paper at Georgetown and unpublished, Chapter 13 in this volume) expand on general possessive concerns. The chapters demonstrate how those issues show up in unexpected domains: e.g. the relation between a nominal and a syntactic presentation of its reference, a clause and a syntactic presentation of its truth value, or a variety of intricacies arising in the analysis of small-clauses of different kinds. Those are already notions which are normally analyzed in paradigmatic terms. We then come to the last two chapters in this section, one that appeared in Theoretical Linguistics (29, 1999), now Chapter 15, and the collaboration with Pietroski in UMDWPL (2001), Chapter 14, where it is explicitly proposed that many familiar paradigmatic cuts on various standard categories may be analyzed in roughly possessive guise, creating various dimensions of syntactic complexity.

21

2 CONCEPTUAL MATTERS

In this chapter a general architectural discussion of minimalism is presented from a derivational viewpoint. Section 1 is a review of the program. Sections 2 and 3 are responses which appeared in the context of a debate over the derivational take on the minimalist perspective.

1 Book review: Noam Chomsky, The Minimalist Program1 It may already be a cliché to note that Chomsky’s latest work (Chomsky 1995b) is both revolutionary and frustrating. To address the latter, the book was published at break-neck speed and would have certainly beneﬁted from more time prior to publication to correct typos (e.g. “with pied-piping” instead of “without piedpiping” on p. 234, second paragraph), “thinkos” (e.g. the claim on p. 235 that “Merge is costless for principled reasons,” which confuses the type of operation with tokens of its application, with non-trivial consequences for the analysis of (169, on p. 346), ensure consistency of style (particularly since the ﬁrst three chapters show the always healthy inﬂuence of Lasnik), sort out the non sequiturs and contradictions in Chapter 4 and guarantee the reliability of the index. Despite these imperfections, the book is a work of genius and I urge readers to overlook these minor defects and persevere with it, in much the same way as an audience at a performance by a legendary artist would ignore small technical inaccuracies. With all that out of the way, I will refrain from repeating the technical wonders of the Minimalist Program (MP), among other things because the very able work of Freidin (1997), and Zwart (1998), already does it justice, in widely accessible and very clear reviews. My interest is slightly more conceptual, which is where I think MP is truly unique. Concretely, the main focus of this review will be to compare the theory of grammar presented in MP (and its assumptions) to its predecessor GB (Government and Binding theory), with which it shares so much and from which it is so very distant. 1.1 Modularity GB was taken to be a modular system where different sub-components of grammar (Case, Theta, Binding, etc.) conspire to limit the class of admissible 22

CONCEPTUAL MATTERS

objects. This was a somewhat peculiar architecture from the point of view of Fodor’s famous modularity thesis (Fodor 1983). For him, there are a variety of isolated mental modules (language faculty, visual system, etc.) connected among themselves by a central system. It is not within the spirit of strict modularity to open the gate to modules within modules (and so on), which in the limit reduces to a connectionist (anti-modular) network. But in GB, for instance the (sub-) module of Binding Theory did have further (sub-sub-)modules: Condition A and Condition B could be independently (in NP-t or pro) or jointly satisﬁed (in PRO), or not at all (in wh-t). Indeed, because of the character just discussed, GB could be, and in fact is being modeled as a connectionist network, as in recent OT proposals. (The only non-connectionist aspect of OT is that, in the classical version of Prince and Smolensky (1993), summations of lower-ranked constraint violations may not outweigh higher-ranked ones; I understand that this has changed in recent proposals.) Constraints on X structures, theta conﬁgurations, Case and Binding relations, and all the rest, do lend themselves to the OT take on language and mind. Thus, X constraints, say, are ranked highest (depending on whether nonconﬁgurationality really exists), and others are ranked in this or the other fashion, yielding variation. The point is: the GB architecture, although sympathetic to Fodorian terminology, was in fact allowing an anti-Fodorian loophole. Of course, a connectionist network can model just about anything; some things, though, it models better than others. If we take the input to the network to be a completely trivial (non articulated) set-theoretic object, then it may or may not be the case that differently ranked constraints do the limiting job, in the meantime yielding variation. This is right or wrong, but not vacuous. More or less explicitly (see footnote 124 to Chapter 2 of Chomsky 1981), the GB input to the phrase-structure component was Lasnik and Kupin’s (1977) sets of monostrings, they themselves described from an unconstrained class of set-theoretic objects that was ﬁltered out through admissibility conditions of various sorts. All other GB modules could be stated as admissibility conditions on those initial set-theoretic objects, and representational versions of the system assumed just that. Which is indeed, more or less reasonably, modeled in OT terms. MP does away with any natural connectionist modeling, since the theory has no modules – only features (p. 225ff.). It could be thought that a feature is just “a tiny module,” but this is really not the case. Whereas a Case module, for example, allows you to say anything you want about its internal workings (whether it invokes command, adjacency, directionality, etc.), a Case feature is a formative of the system, and can only be manipulated according to whatever laws the system as a whole is subject to. It makes no sense to claim, for instance, that (only) Case features are assigned under adjacency; on the other hand, it made perfect sense to say that a conﬁguration of Case assignment which does not satisfy adjacency between the assigner and the assignee is ill-formed. The minimalist thinking is dramatically more limited. MP presents a strongly inductive system, where operations work in a strictly “inside-out” fashion to produce larger objects, which in turn become even larger 23

DERIVATIONS

through movement, and so on (p. 189). Whereas GB’s sets of monostrings could be a reasonable OT input, or GEN (indeed, even the more basic sets of mere strings could), it is senseless to say that MP’s Merge yields something remotely like a representation that OT constraints (of any sort) can manipulate. Nothing gets manipulated by, say, theta requirements until it is merged; no phrase can have anything to do with Case until it is moved (p. 258ff.), etc. The entire system is based on a complex inter-leaving of operations that invoke interactions and construct objects literally at the same time. You could, of course, model that with a connectionist network: having GEN be the output of Merge or Move – but that is trivially uninteresting. If there is a criticism to be made to MP in all these respects, it may be that it still is (not surprisingly) too similar to its GB parent. Thus, the program still analyzes derivations and representations in terms of phi (Case and agreement) features (p. 146ff., etc.), wh-features (p. 266ff.), or categorial (N, V, D . . .) features (e.g. p. 349ff.), obviously because the corresponding phenomena were understood in terms of modules that, in some cases, went by those very names. In most instances this leads to no particular surprises, but it does involve the occasional nightmare when it comes down to such classics as the Extended Projection Principle (pp. 232, 344) or Successive Cyclic wh-movement (e.g. p. 301ff.) – for which no real analysis is provided. Unfortunately, it is unclear (judging from Chomsky 2000, or his Fall 1997 lectures) that any solutions to these problems are forthcoming. 1.2 Government If something was the hallmark of the traditional GB model, it was the everpresent theme of government. Conceptually, government was quite signiﬁcant: it served as the unifying criterion underlying all modules. It was a welcome notion too, since that sort of thing is obviously unpleasant to a connectionist: you do not really expect unifying notions that emerge in the interactions of randomly ranked constraints; why should Case constraints care about movement constraints, say? But of course, the grand unifying role was more rhetorical than anything. For X and theta theories, only government under sisterhood ever mattered; for Bounding Theory, sisterhood plus (perhaps) exceptional government was relevant, for Case and Binding theories, clearly exceptional government, with some added complications posed by speciﬁers, which are technically not governed by the head; for Control theory, it was not even obvious that government made a difference at all. Calling all these notions “government” was the only thing that uniﬁed them. MP bites the bullet, and riding on a wave that was already in motion in GB studies of the late 1980s, it ﬂatly denies the theoretical possibility of invoking government (p. 173). This is quite an interesting move, both theoretically and conceptually. First of all, absence of government leads to all sorts of twists and turns of MP, the most intriguing ones having to do with the treatment of exceptional Case 24

CONCEPTUAL MATTERS

marking and related topics (p. 345ff.) – now by necessity a matter of LF under local conditions (see 147ff.). The door for such analyses was already opened in Chomsky (1986b), which invoked LF movement of associates to their corresponding expletives, to capture their “chain” behavior (see also p. 156). Only a small leap of faith moves us from that long-distance relation to one where no expletive awaits the moved element, and instead a mere relation of grammar (Case checking) obtains (p. 174). The process has to be checking, and not assigning Case, because the covertly moving element must carry its Case from the lexicon, or else it would never fork to PF in the appropriate guise (see p. 195). Second, and more importantly, exactly what is it that disallows the theorist to use government? That is: “what is ‘minimalist’ about Chomsky’s getting rid of government?” Or still in other words: could government ever come back? If as minimalism unfolds, it sticks to its guns, government should never come back. Government is to language like weight or motion are to heavenly bodies: a side effect. Of course, nothing has really been wasted by studying government; all that knowledge is something that any system will have to account for. The bad news, though, is equally interesting: we do not get rid of government because it did not work, but because it was ugly! Government was, ﬁrst of all, ugly in itself – awfully hard to deﬁne coherently. Second, government was theoretically ugly in that, to make it work as it was supposed to (across modules) one had to keep adding except provisos or disjunctive clauses. If MP is right and, as Chomsky puts it (1986b: 168), “the hypotheses are more than just an artifact reﬂecting a mode of inquiry,” there may be something deep about the sort of beauty found in the language faculty, so much so that it restricts our ways of theorizing. Which is to say that, even if it turns out that a theory of language is better off without government, MP would assume no government regardless – so the rhetoric goes. That is, the decision to eliminate government from the theory does not seem to be just the methodological result of Ockham’s Razor, but rather a vague ontological intuition having to do with language being intrinsically beautiful, or “perfect.” Since that is an admittedly crazy stand to take, we should make much of this speculation. 1.3 Economy The best illustration of the bluntest move of MP is the concept of economy. One may have thought that Chomsky goes into the streamlined program he explores because this is the best available theory compatible with the data. This, however, is not obviously the case. Consider, for concreteness, one of the classic traits of GB, the Empty Category Principle (ECP) alluded to in p. 78ff., which was proposed in Lasnik and Saito (1984). Lasnik and Saito’s piece was, I think, misunderstood. They were the precursors of a single transformational process (“do whatever anywhere to anything”) that massively over generates, to then constrain the excess baggage in terms of principled (intra-modular) requirements. Their GB logic was as impeccable as 25

DERIVATIONS

their explanation was clear. Yet just about everyone was troubled by derivations that allowed movement “back and forth”; but why? Was that not the best theory with the fewest assumptions, with reasonable interacting theoretical elements that were there (to either make use of, or else explain away)? Yet MP explicitly denies us the possibility of moving “back and forth” to satisfy the ECP (the central notion last resort, via the various versions of greed explored in the book, impedes any movement that is not self-serving). Why is this so? Because that is how we are going to design things from now on. Of course, it is not the best theory, if only because it has to add a stipulation to the set of axioms (greed), no matter how many fancy terms we give it. Plainly, the theory is not so economical as the previous, but is nonetheless about a more economical object. I am loading the dice here to make a point. There are senses in which the emerging theory in MP is better than GB, in the Ockham’s Razor sense. It has, for example, fewer levels of representation (two instead of four, as from Chapter 3 onward), fewer modules (only one), less reference to non-trivial relations (perhaps just command, as in p. 254), and less of just about everything else. But, ﬁrst of all, one has to be careful with this estimate. The system may only have two levels of representation, but it packs into deﬁnitions of various sorts all kinds of references to what used to be, say, D-structure (a multi-set of lexical tokens or numeration (p. 225), theta-relations in hierarchically conﬁgurational terms and one-to-one correspondence to arguments (p. 312), a mysterious requirement to check subject D-features (p. 232), and so on). Similarly, while the system may have no sub-modules, it does fundamentally distinguish among different types of features (p. 277) – so much so that relativized minimality is cued to these distinctions (297ff.). Which is all to say the obvious: it is hard to make good Ockham’s Razor arguments; what you take here, you often have to give back over there. Still, regardless of how many true stipulations are left in MP when someone ﬁgures out exactly what it is saying and exactly how it does what it claims to do, the program will probably stick to a rhetorical point. It does not matter. What you care about is not how many stipulations you need (at least, you do not any more than you do in any other science); rather, the fuss seems to be all about how “perfect” language is, how much “like a crystal” it is, or like one of those body plans that enthuse complexity theorists (e.g. the Fibonacci patterns that arise in plant morphology). These are all metaphors from Chomsky’s classes, although the present book only indirectly alludes to these issues (e.g. on p. 1 or p. 161ff.; see also the ﬁrst few pages of Chomsky 2000). 1.4 A “mind plan” But of course, those considerations are not new to Chomskyan thought. Certainly, there are aspects of MP, and even more so of its follow-up (Chomsky 2000), which closely resemble Chomsky’s (1955) masterpiece. These include a heavily derivational model, a highly dynamic system where chunks of structure 26

CONCEPTUAL MATTERS

are merged and moved and manipulated as the derivational cycle unfolds and, in a word, the ﬂexibility of a derivational ﬂow that makes one seriously compare the linguistic “mind plan” with other “body plans” out there in nature, which are unmistakably ﬂexible, dynamic and derivational (in the mathematical sense of the term; cf. the derivational models of plant or shell growth that stem from Aristide Lindemayer’s work, which is explicitly based on Chomsky’s rewrite rules). This “wormhole” between Chomsky’s last work and his ﬁrst is, I think, very important for two reasons. One is intrinsic to MP, and clearly noted on p. 168. What are we to make of a system that is “perfect,” in the sense of MP – that is, presenting “discrete unboundedness,” “plastic underdeterminacy” and “structural economy”? Perhaps Chomsky’s greatest intellectual contribution so far is having the world acknowledge that there is something biological to grammar. But what is biological about those “perfect” properties? If this question is not addressed, a serious crisis lurks behind MP: how a seemingly artiﬁcial (“perfect”) program is to be squared with the traditional Chomskyan naturalistic goal. The fact that some modern biology is going in the direction that Chomsky foresaw, indeed decades ago, is not only a way out of a crisis that is at that point merely methodological (why are organisms that way, in general, if standard neoDarwinism has nothing to say about their “perfection”), but it is also a tribute to one of the deepest glories of MP: that it presents in detail what might be a reasonable “mind plan” in a concrete organism, us. More generally, this biological connection (albeit with the new biology) may be of use to those of us who think of ourselves as standard syntacticians. Let us not forget that, when all sound and fury is over, MP as it stands has relatively little to say about the ECP and all it was designed to achieve – not to mention scores of other issues. This is neither here nor there, but the question remains whether solutions are to be found within the technical conﬁnes of features right here or checking over there. Of course, this is just one among several possible instantiations of what looks like a very good idea, which makes syntactic representations and their interactions awfully similar, mathematically at least, to what goes on in nature. But if the latter is the case, one need not stop where MP has. Obvious questions remain. What does it mean to have movement, variation, morphology altogether? Why are syntactic objects arranged in terms of merge and its history? What are syntactic features and categories? Why does the system involve uninterpretable mechanisms? How tight is the connection to the interface systems, in what guise does it come, how many of those really exist? This is only the tip of the iceberg. Seen from the perspective of nature’s laws, those are truly fascinating questions, and the fact that we are even asking them is part of Chomsky’s legacy. Indeed, the possibility that “out there” and “in here” may be so closely related – even if obviously different – is, apart from humbling, some serious cause for optimism in our search, particularly for those who resist embarking on methodologically dualist quests that treat mind as different from matter. The irony is that (organized) matter might be much closer to mind than anybody had imagined, except Chomsky. 27

DERIVATIONS

2 On the emptiness of “design” polemics Lappin, Levine and Johnson (2000, henceforth LLJ) are concerned about the ﬁeld gravitating toward the Minimalist Program (MP) without having exhausted the possibilities of the “Government and Binding” (GB) theory.2 In this reply, I concentrate on a concrete paradigm that has resisted a GB analysis. Since LLJ attack Chomsky’s system using in large part my book Rhyme and Reason (Uriagereka 1998), I will respond in my own terms. I believe that the analysis I discuss is in the spirit of precisely those general aspects of MP that LLJ ﬁnd offensive, and it constitutes a good example of what they call a “staple cliché of trendy ‘parascientiﬁc’ chit-chat.” After I present the analysis, I discuss its assumptions, and attempt to show how they are not particularly unreasonable, or profoundly different from those that any natural scientist would make. That being the case, the force behind LLJ’s criticism dissipates. Languages differ as to whether the associate (A) in expletive constructions appears before or after a participial (P) expression. The (P, A) order is found, for instance, in Spanish (1), while (A, P) is attested in English (2): (1) Quedaron escritos tres libros. remained.AGR written.AGR three books (2) There remained three books written. Two variables seem implicated in the distribution of the orderings. One is verbal agreement. In constructions that present default V agreement in Spanish, the (P, A) order reverts to (A, P): (3) Hay tres libros escritos. have.DEF three books written.AGR “There are three books written.” The other relevant variable appears to be participial agreement. Swedish examples illustrate: (4) a. Det tre böcker skrivna. it three books written-AGR b. Det blev skrivet tre böcker. it became written.No-AGR three books Note ﬁrst that V does not agree in these instances; second, observe how in constructions that lack P agreement in Swedish, the (A, P) order reverts to (P, A) (in contrast to (2)–(3)). Generalizing: (5) a. (P, A) in and, b. (A, P) in and

i(i) (ii) i(i) (ii)

V-agr, P-agr instances non-V-agr, non-P-agr instances. V-agr, non-P-agr instances non-V-agr, P-agr instances.

(5ai) is exempliﬁed by V-agreeing Romance constructions and (5aii) by standard Danish, Norwegian and non-P-agreeing Swedish, whereas English 28

CONCEPTUAL MATTERS

exempliﬁes (5bi) and West Norwegian, default-V-agreeing Spanish, and P-agreeing Swedish exemplify (5bii).3 While that is a description of a complex state of affairs, it is hardly an explanation. The problem is in the system presupposed by (5), in which a higher order predicate is needed to make the system intelligible. We need to range over values of parameters to state relevant generalizations: (6) For ranging over “” and “”: a. V-agr, P-agr ↔ (P, A) b. V-agr, -P-agr ↔ (A, P) An example of this sort of generalization from the GB literature is Jaeggli and Saﬁr’s (1989) observation that languages have pro-drop if they have full-ﬂedged agreement (Spanish) or no agreement at all (Chinese). But MP does not allow us to formulate such a meta-statement, as it would not be expressible with the bare representational notation that comes from the lexicon. In large part, minimalism was designed to deal with precisely the sorts of facts above, where one particular derivation is not generally ungrammatical; rather, it is bad because an alternative derivation, in some deﬁnable sense, is better. To carry this logic through, we must make certain assumptions whose soundness I leave for the end of this note. The basic idea is discussed in Martin and Uriagereka (forthcoming): (7) Within local derivational horizons, derivations take those steps which maximize further convergent derivational options. (8) All else being equal, derivations involving fewest steps outrank their alternatives. (8) is Chomsky’s (1995b) idea about comparing derivations within a given reference set. (7) is a new proposal, also in the spirit of optimality criteria. Assume that “local derivational horizon” means a choice of formal alternatives for a derivationally committed structure (e.g. move vs. merge of some formal item). If we select a new substantive lexical item, relevant derivations are no longer comparable from that point on. Furthermore, observe how (7) explicitly introduces the idea of the entropy of a derivation, if we think of derivational options (i.e. whether after a given point further moves/merges are allowed) as “micro-states” of the system compatible with the whole derivational “macro-state,” given the relevant horizon. A derivational decision d will allow further convergent steps in a number of n possibilities, whereas some other derivational decision d will only allow a number m of possible continuations, where m n. In those circumstances d induces more derivational entropy than d does, which (7) aims at optimizing. Given this machinery, (9) sketches the ﬁrst relevant bifurcation of derivational paths. If we take the derivational step in (9a), putting aside further movements (see Note 2), the resulting order will be (P, A), whereas (9b) immediately leads to the (A, P) order.4 But the question from the point of view of entropy is what happens next, within a relevant derivational horizon. We must consider in turn each of the derivational paths in (9). 29

DERIVATIONS

PP

(9) a.

P'

EXPL P [agr]

N PP

b. N

P' P [agr] t

Starting with (9a), observe how the expletive should block further movement of N across it (a locality effect). Let us state this in terms of Chomsky’s (1995b) notion “Attract.” Some further category higher up in the tree (T) can attract EXPL, as in (10a), but not N across EXPL (10b): (10)

a.

T' T

PP

EXPL PP

P' P [agr]

P'

EXPL

N

P [agr]

b.

N

T' T

PP EXPL

P'

P [agr] N

30

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Compare this situation to the one in (9b). For that structure, two derivational paths are possible: a.

(11)

TP EXPL

T' T

PP N

PP N

P'

P' P [agr]

P [agr]

t t

b.

T' T

PP N

P' P [agr] t

In (11a) we insert the expletive in the TP Spec , whereas in (11b) T attracts the associate. These are two convergent steps, unlike (10b).5 Therefore the entropy of (9b) (the number of continuations it allows) is higher. Again, the system goes with the derivational decision that leads to this result, in compliance with (7), and thus predicting languages of the sort in (5b). The logic of the reasoning forces us to say that, in languages of the sort in (5a), alternative derivational steps are equally entropic. Observe that, if this is indeed the case, familiar economy considerations as in (8) will predict (9a) (with no costly moves) to outrank (9b). But why should it be that in the relevant circumstances entropy gets equalized? As it turns out, languages with agreement in the V and P systems obtain this result in a way which has nothing to do with why languages with no agreement do. Let us examine this in detail. In languages with agreement in V and P, overt expletives are generally impossible. Suppose that an element with no phonetic or semantic realization (a null expletive) simply does not exist. If so, in this language step (9a) is not an option. When the Part domain is reached, the only options are to take or not to take step (9b). Taking it will lead to taking or not taking step (11b); not taking (9b) will lead (in principle) to again taking or not taking (9b). The derivations 31

DERIVATIONS

are equally entropic, hence the costless one wins. That is, the winner is the one with the non-moved A, according to generalization (5ai).6 In contrast, in languages with no agreement, the expletive is clearly present. So how do we distinguish this case from that of languages with an expletive but some form of agreement in the participial? Observe each instance side by side: (12) a.

T'

T'

b.

T

PP EXPL

T P'

PP EXPL

P [agr]

P'

P [agr] N

N

The very same relation between T and N which is impossible in (12a) (case (10b) repeated) becomes possible across an expletive which does not agree with a participial head (12b). The easiest way to state this contrast is to say that the agreeing expletive is visible to the system in a way that the non-agreeing expletive is not, hence only the former prevents Attraction across it.7 Of course, if (12b) is indeed an option, then the entropy of each of the alternatives in (10)/(11) gets equalized, and again the grammaticality decision must be made in terms of (8), thus correctly predicting no movement in these instances (5aii). I would welcome a complete explanation of facts like these in non-minimalist terms; I am not familiar with any. What is even more important is that while (6) is true, it is a spurious generalization. There is no deep sense in which languages with equal values for V – or P – agreement should also have a (P, A) order, or languages with different values for these variables should have an (A, P) order. If we were told that the very opposite generalization held, nothing would shock us. But after having seen the reasoning above, the opposite state of affairs would be unexpected. I believe that it is analyses of this sort that should be used to decide whether Chomsky’s idea is productive. Of course, some non-trivial assumptions that we have made need to be discussed. For instance, why is economy “ranked” with regards to entropy? In this respect, R&Rs’ suggestion about extending naturalistic metaphors may be more than “chit-chat,” and no different from similar extensions in complexity studies more generally. In nature, (7) is comparable to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, whereas (8) has the ﬂavor of the Slaving Principle in synergetics. All of nature obeys the second law, but within the parameters it allows, certain systems ﬁnd points of stability as a consequence of various processes of local feedback. Turbulence emerges in this fashion – not at random points, but in those where a certain ﬂuctuation exists at lower levels of energy. This is consistent with the second law, but not predicted by it; an ordering principle is required to determine why turbulence emerges here and not 32

CONCEPTUAL MATTERS

there, and that principle can be metaphorically linked with the idea that costly derivations are dispreferred. What interests me, however, is the ranking. The Second Law ﬁrst, the Slaving Principle within its conﬁnes. Could the ranking of (7) over (8) be related to this state of affairs? My speculation that it can will be fully tested only when we learn more about the physical basis of language in evolution, development and performance. Then again, how different would this metaphorical extension be from the ones made in computational biology when modeling organisms in terms of optima? Fukui’s (1996) original paper – from which R&R took the provocative thought that comparing derivational alternatives resembles Least Action in physics – explicitly made this same point for optimization in computer science. A concrete example that Fukui could not have anticipated, but which neatly illustrates his claim, is the analysis that West, Brown and Enqist (1997) provide of the cardiovascular system of vertebrates as a fractal space ﬁlling networks of branching tubes, under the assumption that the energy dissipated by this transportation system is minimized. That condition is a deﬁning property of the system – it does not follow from anything. Suppose we applied LLJ’s logic for why my naturalistic take on MP is “groundless,” to this celebrated example. Optimality principles in physics “are derived from deeper physical properties of the (entities) which satisfy them . . . By contrast, the MP takes economy . . . to be one of (the grammar’s; here, the biological system’s) deﬁning properties.” The premises are both true, but nothing follows. Would LLJ ask the scientiﬁc community to dump West, Brown and Enquist’s explanation of scaling laws – the only one around in biology – because it is irreducible in the way they suggest, hence “groundless”? That reductionism would be short-sighted. Intuitions about optima in physics appeared well before anyone had any idea as to how to deduce them from ﬁrst principles, as in the current systems that LLJ allude to. This did not stop physicists from proceeding with their assumptions. Surely LLJ cannot be implying that only present-day physics, one state in an enterprise, matters, unless they are prepared to call “groundless” what was done prior to Einstein. By the same reasoning, computational biology is a perfectly grounded science, even if its optima are not based on the properties of the units that biology studies or do not reduce to the structure of quarks. And by the very same token, I fail to see why linguistics should be subject to a different standard. Many linguists who worked seriously within GB noticed that it allowed too much power: “Do anything to anything anywhere at any time.” That of course provided very interesting accounts of Empty Category Principle effects, but it became useful to limit the movement mechanism. The result was “last resort.” Do something which has a purpose, in some sense. Obviously that is a new axiom, with an economy ﬂavor to it. Coupling it with other axioms explored at the time, which invoked certain symmetries within linguistic representations, ﬁeld-like conditions on locality, uniformities across various notions and levels, a new spirit emerged. Could it be that language is structured in precisely those elegant terms? Taking the idea to the status of an appropriately extreme 33

DERIVATIONS

research question, one is led to ask: “How much sense is there in asking whether language is ‘perfect’?” The answer to this is purely empirical, and whether MP succeeds as a natural extension of GB should not be decided a priori. That means we have to, as Brecht’s Galileo puts it, “bother to look.” I believe that LLJ are too hasty in their conclusion that MP is “ungrounded in empirical considerations.” Are the facts above not empirical? I cannot go into a lengthy presentation of the relevant literature, but without even considering works by the many established linguists who have already made signiﬁcant contributions to MP, one can ﬁnd a host of younger colleagues who have provided what looks to me like deep accounts of Case/agreement distributions, islands, superiority effects, parasitic gaps, coordination, different binding requirements, quantiﬁer relations, reconstruction, and control, just to name the obvious. None of these were discussed in detail in R&R (it was not the place for that), but the ones accessible in the mid-1990s were certainly included in the twenty plus pages of widely available references. One just has to bother to look. Although I let my other colleagues comment on the passionate, unnecessary overtones of LLJs’ piece, I do want to mention that conceding that “the conceptual defects of [MP] are probably no worse in kind than earlier examples might be” is unfortunately familiar rhetoric, especially when coupled with wild claims about the ﬁeld of linguistics being irrationally dominated by Chomsky’s demon. Ironically, this perpetuates the myth that MP is Chomsky’s toy story, and not the collegial effort of many scholars who knew the limitations GB faced, and forged ahead.

3 Cutting derivational options8 Lappin, Levine and Johnson (LLJ) categorize my ﬁrst reply to their piece as something “which addresses our main objection to the MP by attempting to present a substantive defense of economy conditions in the theory of grammar.” This is why I chose the paradigm I did, among other possible ones amenable to broadly minimalistic considerations: it illustrated competing derivations at play, and procedures to choose among them. I purposely tried to study, also, a case where different possible orders come out as grammatical in different languages. Any analysis of these facts should be welcome. The “most important” critique that LLJ present of my reply aims directly at that choice of facts. This is surprising, as the Romance data I reported have been replicated elsewhere, having ﬁrst being pointed out, in some form, by Luigi Burzio – some twenty years ago. The Scandinavian facts I mentioned are due to Anders Holmberg in his careful study of various Germanic languages, and have been the focus of attention of several papers recently. My rather modest contribution was putting the various observations in the form of a generalization: languages with the same value ( or ) for verb and participial agreement exhibit participle-associate NP (P,A) order, while languages with distinct values for verb and participial agreement display A,P order in expletive structures. 34

CONCEPTUAL MATTERS

LLJs’ counterexample to my generalization is this: in some languages both orders arise, regardless of agreement. LLJs’ data is as reported in (13), with their judgments, and its Hebrew translation (English has mixed agreement while Hebrew has full agreement, both relevant test-cases): (13) a. ?There remained three players sitting. b. ?There remained sitting three players. Although it is certainly true that the grammaticality contrasts I was alluding to are not always dramatic (speakers often “can get” the alternative order, but it is signaled as less preferred, marked, or just bizarre), I have not found a native speaker of English who does not detect something odd about (13b). In my experience, to the extent that examples like (13b) are acceptable in this language, they need an intonation break between sitting and the rest of the sentence, which is best if heavy in either syllabic terms (i.e. long) or phonological weight; thus my data analysis would be as in (14), instead of (13): (14) a. ??? There remained sitting three players. b. There remained sitting three players who had no idea what the play was. c. There remained sitting THREE PLAYERS. None of these considerations about heaviness obtain for the alternative orderings of the associate and P. Several recent papers discuss the possibility that the “inverted” orders in (14) result from stylistic adjustment, not unlike Heavy NP shift. If so, the facts in (14) are no counterexample to my syntactic generalization. Appropriately idealized, (13a) is pretty good and (13b) is pretty bad. Also, observe (15), an existential construction with be which, to start with, is the most natural in English (vis-à-vis examples with unaccusative verbs), and thus yields more robust judgments: (15) a. There was not a single player sitting. b. ?*There was not sitting a single player. (15), and the appropriately analyzed instances in (14), seem like potentially relevant examples for derivational accounts of the minimalist sort: precisely in that we have to justify why (15a) (presumably with A movement) “wins over” alternative (15b) (certainly with no such movement). That (15b) is a reasonable alternative, in principle, is shown by the fact that the relevant order in that instance is ﬁne, in fact preferred, in other languages. Given the sort of generalization I attempted, in a language like Hebrew – with full agreement in both the verbal and participial paradigms – my expectation would be that precisely the option where A does not move is what eliminates the alternative with movement as a grammatical route. So in a paradigm like (16), which LLJ provide, I clearly expect (16b) (where shlosha saxkanim “three players” is presumably not displaced) to derivationally outrank (16a) (where shlosha saxkanim is “wrapped around” yoshvim “sitting,” the P element): 35

DERIVATIONS

(16) a. Nisharu shlosha saxkanim yoshvim. remained-3pl-past three-m players-m-pl sitting-m-pl “There remained sitting three players.” b. Nisharu yoshvim shlosha saxkanim. remained-3pl-past sitting-m-pl three-m players-m-pl “There remained sitting three players.” LLJ detect no preferences in (16), unlike what happens, say, in Romance. Note that Hebrew allows for post-verbal subjects, hence (16b) could be analyzed as the equivalent of the English three players remained sitting, albeit with stylistic inversion of the subject – which again is irrelevant for my purposes (no displacement of three players). Of course, the potentially troubling example for me is (16a), and the question I face, whether I am forced to analyze this string of words in structural terms which are pertinent for the generalization I posited: has A been displaced here? The relevant structural terms are as in (17), where the main verb selects the P structure sitting three players, and subsequently three players moves: (17) [remained [three players [sitting t]]] However, the verb remain, or its Hebrew version nisharu, may also select for a regular nominal expression, in which case in principle two further structures could be at issue (actually four, if we also consider the possibility of inverted subjects noted above – which I now set aside): (18) a. [remained [three [[players] sitting]]]] b. [[remained [three players]] sitting] In (18a) sitting is a modiﬁcational element; in (18b), a secondary predicate. All of this has some relevance for the worrisome (16a), which could have the analyses in (19): (19) a. [Nisharu [shlosha [[saxkanim] yoshvim]]]] remained three players sitting b. [[Nisharu [shlosha saxkanim]] yoshvim] remained three players sitting Perhaps obviously now, neither of these structures is pertinent to my generalization. Not all Hebrew speakers like yoshvim “sitting” as an adjectival element, although all those that I have consulted accept it as a participial. For those people, then, only (17) should be a possible analysis. Most of my informants ﬁnd (16a), presumably under non-adjectival circumstances, worse than (16b). Again, the structure is recovered with postposition to the right periphery, for contrastive focus: (20) nisharu ba-gan shlosha saxkanim yoshvim remain in-the-garden three players sitting 36

CONCEPTUAL MATTERS

This too is irrelevant, and makes (20) similar, in signiﬁcant respects, to the examples in (14). Alongside active participles like yoshvim, Hebrew also allows for passive participles like yeshuvim, which is analogous to the English “seated” and thus easier to use as an adjective. Predictably, those speakers that ﬁnd (16a) degraded accept (21) without troubles: (21) Nisharu shlosha saxkanim yeshuvim remained-3pl-past three-m players-m-pl seated-m-pl “There remained three seated players/three players seated.” Once more this particular structure has nothing to do with my generalization, and conﬁrms, in its contrast to the degraded nature of (16a) in relevant guise, the overall claims I made. The empirical challenge, thus, dissipates both for English and for Hebrew, which align with other languages as predicted. This is hardly surprising. True optionality is rather scarce; it often tells us more about our carelessness as researchers than about the nature of syntax. It is worth mentioning, also, what LLJ propose as an analysis of what they take to be the facts (both possible {P, A} orders in all sorts of languages, contra my generalization): in the end “lexical properties of the participle (optional Case assignment?) are the main factor in determining the order of the NP associate relative to P.” The disconcerting aspect of LLJs’ critique is not so much the denial of the facts as lexical idiosyncrasies, but rather the thought that optional Case assignment – which poses too many problems for me to address in a few pages – may have anything to do with the overall analysis. So much for the key critique. Let me turn to the interesting questions, assuming the facts. This is the main body of their response to my proposal, which they ﬁnd to have four “serious problems.” The ﬁrst is presented within the veiled complaint that my formulation of the entropy condition is not precise; LLJ were able to understand it as follows: “at any given point d in a derivation D, it selects from the set O of possible operations the one which, when applied to d, produces the largest number of convergent derivational paths from d compared to other operations in O.” I could not have said it any better. What is imprecise about that is unclear. But this is not the criticism (just the general tone); the actual concern is the fact that this is not an economy condition. Of course, I never said it was. Their question is, “Why should maximizing the number of convergent continuations of a derivation produce a more economical derivation?” This reﬂects, I believe, a profound misconception as to how the strong minimalist thesis is supposed to work, so let me pause to address it. There are two misunderstandings hidden in the presuppositions of that question. One is technical. MP was conceived, in part, as an attempt to limit the class of possible derivations that the P&P system allowed. Several tools were explored for that; the notion of last resort was one of them, economy conditions (in the technical sense) a different one. In either instance, by the end of the day 37

DERIVATIONS

only some of many possible derivations are convergent or optimal, and in those terms grammatical. My entropy condition – aside from relevant to the broad conceptual concerns that LLJ were raising in their ﬁrst piece – is just another way of limiting the class of possible derivations. How it works is simple: you arrive at a derivational juncture d and face, say, two options x and y. Where the P&P model would have said “take either,” MP says “choose one.” The entropy condition provides us with a method to decide: if x allows more convergent derivational continuations than y (within a deﬁned space), then x outranks y. This is certainly not an economy condition as such (for instance in the sense that a strategy to take the fewest derivational steps is). But why should it be an economy condition? All that matters is the selection of a grammatical derivational path over its alternatives. Similarly, when Chomsky in recent work maximizes the checking of features at a given site this is not, in itself, an economy condition; but it certainly has indirect economy consequences, in that it reduces the class of grammatical derivations. The second misunderstanding is conceptual. The strong minimalist thesis seeks to determine whether a very interesting proposal concerning the nature of the language faculty is true, and if so in what form. The idea is that language arises at the optimal interface between an autonomous syntactic organ and other mental capacities. The question then becomes empirical, concerning, in large part, the speciﬁc sense in which the interface and how it is accessed turn out to be optimal. In that context, an economy condition is as expected as a maximization principle of the sort I (or Chomsky, in the case of feature checking) proposed, as would be other optima which encounter familiar expressions in other sciences. Optimal design cannot be determined a priori, and the only way to go about understanding its properties is to propose various reasonable concepts and see what empirical pay off they have. LLJ claim that “[f]rom a computational perspective [my suggestion] is precisely the opposite of an optimal system . . . Uriagereka provides no independent justiﬁcation for his principle, and it is not clear to us how it encodes any recognizable concept of perfection in computational design.” I believe this touches on the crux of the matter, and is one of the reasons why LLJ seem so passionate about all of this. The ﬁeld has largely ignored their concerns about globality in previous work, which they cite abundantly. This was so for two reasons, both raised by Chomsky in various places. First of all, a formal problem in some limit for a system of use has no obvious bearing on a system of knowledge. Familiar examples of this abound: e.g. center embedding poses a computational problem, so speakers avoid it. If the kinds of derivations that LLJ are concerned with are equally problematic, speakers will refrain from going into them – there is plenty of expressive space elsewhere. Second, and more importantly, it turned out to be trivial to reduce those phenomenal formal problems to nought. For example, any sort of cyclic computation entails that the class of alternative derivations at any given point is very small, thus not a mathematical explosion. In the very example I provided, I insisted on the fact that entropy is computed locally, within a derivational horizon established by lexical choice. If 38

CONCEPTUAL MATTERS

you get a new substantive item from the lexicon, there goes the computation of entropy; there is, thus, no computational blow-up. Thus the worry about complexity, in and of itself, seems superﬂuous. In contrast, how to limit derivational choices is still an issue; not because of computational concerns, but because alternatives to grammatical options, even if convergent and intelligible, are plainly unacceptable to speakers. In that context, all that a design property of grammars (whether they obey last resort, economy, maximal feature matching, entropy, or whatever) really needs in order to be justiﬁed is to show whether it cuts derivational choices. A serious conceptual problem with my entropy suggestion (or any other such design property) would arise only if it has no formal consequence, thus no weight on deciding among derivations, to choose the grammatical output. To judge design properties in any other terms (e.g. to demand that they be, speciﬁcally, economy conditions, in the technical sense of the notion) is to have misunderstood why we are positing them to start with. Let me continue with LLJs’ list of conceptual challenges. Their second one pertains to the fact that my “explanation requires that entropy be ranked above the smallest-number-of-steps-condition. He seeks to justify this ranking by comparing entropy to the Second Law of Thermodynamics . . . Presumably the smallest steps condition is less binding in its effects.” All of this is true, which LLJ take to be “deeply confused and based largely on a misplaced analogy.” While I have not provided, and cannot provide, an extra-linguistic justiﬁcation for my analogy, I fail to see how it can be decided, a priori, whether it is misplaced. True, I believe – with Chomsky – that the speciﬁc properties of mind that we are exploring will ultimately be uniﬁed with characteristics of the “boring” universe, and how they manifest themselves in minds as a result of brain organization in evolution and development, within the constraints imposed by the physico-chemical channel; and true, I cannot justify this nor know of any theory that even attempts to do so. Nonetheless, my take on the strong minimalist thesis is in pretty much those terms, however distant they may be from a satisfying uniﬁcation with other disciplines. That was the thesis in Rhyme and Reason, for conceptual reasons: once you give up a functionalist approach to optimality in grammars, what else could it be other than the familiarly optimal universe (in physics and chemistry) manifesting itself in biology? In that and other works I have tried to show that this proposition is not particularly crazy for other domains of (computational) biology, body plans and all that. To decide, from the start, that this is misplaced analogy and misunderstanding seems at best unimaginative. It is arguably a bit more dishonest than that. LLJ ought to know that there is a connection discussed in the computational literature between information and negative entropy, and that entropy is routinely used in the life sciences, as per the advice of no less than Schrödinger. In fact, the model study that I followed for the presentation of phyllotaxis in Rhyme and Reason, namely Roger Jean’s work, explicitly discusses an account for the ordering facts one of whose factors is a characterization of entropy. I do not want to venture whether LLJ consider 39

DERIVATIONS

those extensions misplaced as well, but I do reckon that in those instances, too, nobody has been able to reduce the explanation to ﬁrst principles in quantum mechanics. The measure of success has been how well the model accounts for observed properties of plant symmetry. Why should our science be subject to a higher standard? LLJ take me, “[i]n seeking to rank economy conditions relative to each other . . . to be invoking as his model an OT hierarchy of defeasible constraints.” That claim is entirely false. My ranking has the same status within the system as that existing between, say, the choice of a minimal part of a numeration, in Chomsky’s recent terms, and within those conﬁnes the particular derivation d that such-and-such. This is a kind of ranking that results from the design of the grammar, and as such has nothing to do with the variable rankings possible in OT, the source of linguistic variation in that model; I do not expect any variation in entropy trumping economy. Suppose I had ranked economy above entropy; what would that mean? If entropy is taken, in essence, as the opposite of information, augmenting entropy is akin to reducing committed information (leaving options open); it is sensible to ﬁnd the most economical among those open options. But once you commit to the optimal option, I am not sure what sense there is in, then, seeking the option that leaves most options open. A different story, of course, is whether that particular modeling of the system is ultimately sound (for my proposal as well as in that of parts of numerations chosen prior to derivations, or any others); whether, for instance, the rationale for the ranking I have outlined follows from its own logic or, rather, is a dull consequence of how information arises in the physical universe. That question is unresolved in linguistics, as it is in plant morphology or wherever else in the universe that form matters. The third and fourth challenges are less grandiose, and reﬂect a misunderstanding, whether resulting from their reading or my writing, I do not know. I do claim that, as they put it, “null expletives are not present in [languages with full agreement], and so expletive insertion is not possible.” That is a familiar position from the literature, which would for instance account for why these sorts of languages do not generally have overt T expletives (there is nothing to be had). I also claim that a grammar with those characteristics will never face a derivational decision in the entropic terms I suggest, as the continuations of the possible paths to be taken are equally rich: to move or not to move. (Alternatively, as Roger Martin suggests, in this instance there is no derivational choice and thus entropy is irrelevant.) They ﬁnd this assertion to rely “on the vague nature of the entropy principle which permits Uriagereka to claim equivalence of derivational options without any obvious basis for doing so.” I think this perception stems from a misconstrual of how the entropy condition is supposed to work, as this passage suggests: “If one selects movement of A to Spec of P, then further movement of A to Spec of T . . . is possible, while on the initial in situ choice this latter derivation is ruled out.” I cannot tell why LLJ think the latter derivational step (A from the P Spec to the T Spec ) is in principle ruled out (aside from its ultimate fate in this particular derivation). My condition seeks to 40

CONCEPTUAL MATTERS

choose the derivational path which “increase[s] the number of (locally) available convergent paths in the derivation,” [my emphasis in their own, correct, rendition of my proposal]; the path in question is used for standard movement to subject position, hence is a fortiori convergent, hence the entropy of each path is the same. The fourth criticism grows from a fact that I myself pointed out in the footnotes: my “explanation of the P,A order for languages with no verbal or participle agreement relies crucially on the assumption that a non-agreeing expletive is invisible to movement, and so it does not block ‘long’ movement . . .” I said that a more elaborate explanation is possible if instead of taking the expletive as the blocker we take agreement to be the relevant element. Although this will add absolutely nothing to the conceptual discussion, I will sketch the alternative. (The impatient reader can skip this part.) The relevant patterns are as in (22): (22) a. … AgrV … AgrP … NP

b. … AgrV … AgrP … NP

c. … AgrV … AgrP … NP

d. … AgrV … AgrP … NP

Suppose that the associate NP is being probed (in Chomsky’s recent sense, represented as an arrow in (22)), and only Agr elements are active for the task. In (22c) and (22d) the active Agr heads probe the associate NP. In (22a), suppose one Agr head probes the other, as they are both active; thus something else must probe NP, say T. A similar situation arises in (22b), where both Agr heads are inactive. Next consider the computation of entropy, this time with respect to Probe/goal relations across no intervening extra Probe (i.e. locally). For (22c) and (22d) – where in the end NP moves – we want entropy to favor a movement step, which must mean that the continuations of that step are more numerous than continuations of a competing merging step. In the merging step a pleonastic is entered as an AgrP speciﬁer. Assuming, with Chomsky, that pleonastic elements can themselves be probing heads if they have agreeing (person) features, there will be active pleonastics in (22c) and (22d), licensed in terms of association with Agr heads, either directly (22d) or after movement (22c). It is these active pleonastics that count as intervening probes, thus eliminating relations across them. The reasoning just given must mean that in neither (22a) or (22b) should there be active pleonastics, as they are no active licensing Agr heads there. This is rather obvious for (22a), as nothing is pronounced or interpreted in subject position; for (22b) it must mean that the pleonastic involved in this case is only a PF reﬂex. As a consequence, in both these instances relations across either nothing or a mere PF formative are possible, and entropy gets equalized; then merge trumps move, as desired. In the end that more or less elaborate reasoning follows, also, if one simply assumes that the sort of expletive in (22b) is a late arrival in the derivation, in the PF component, hardly a new proposal in the literature. It seems unfair to consider “a serious problem with [my] argument” a claim that suggests that if 41

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a language has some agreement (in V or in P), then it can syntactically license a bona ﬁde pleonastic, but if it does not have any agreement whatsoever, then a pleonastic is only licensed stylistically or phonologically. That may be wrong, but I ﬁnd it neither “vague” nor “ad hoc.” LLJ compare – for I suppose postmodern purposes – the language faculty to a urinary tract. Our main point of disagreement may ultimately be this. What seems to me remarkable about the linguistic system is that it has amazingly elegant properties regardless of the utterly bizarre uses humans can put this system to (e.g. this whole discussion). In that it seems different from LLJs’ urinary tract, which might also correlate with why they share the latter with all other vertebrates, whereas the former is a bit more restricted. I read Chomsky in MP as taking a stab at that mystery.

42

Part I SYNTAGMATIC ISSUES

3 MULTIPLE SPELL-OUT †

1 Deducing the base step of the LCA A main desideratum of the Minimalist Program is reducing substantive principles to interface (or bare output) conditions, and formal principles to economy conditions. Much energy has been devoted to rethinking constraints and phenomena that appear to challenge this idea, in the process sharpening observations and descriptions. In this chapter, I attempt to reduce a version of Kayne’s (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA). Chomsky (1995c) already limits the LCA’s place in the grammar. Kayne’s version of the axiom is a formal condition on the shape of phrase markers. Chomsky’s (for reasons that go back to Higginbotham 1983b) is a condition that operates at Spell-out, because of PF demands. Kayne’s intuition is that a nonlinearized phrase marker is ill formed, in itself, whereas for Chomsky such an object is ill formed only at PF, hence the need to linearize it upon branching to this component. Chomsky’s version is arguably “more minimalist” in that linearization is taken to follow from bare output conditions. The axiom has a formal and a substantive character. The formal part demands the linearization of a complex object (assembled by the Merge operation, which produces mere associations among terms). A visual image to keep in mind is a mobile by Calder. The hanging pieces relate in a ﬁxed way, but are not linearly ordered with respect to one another; one way to linearize the mobile (e.g. so as to measure it) is to lay it on the ground. The substantive part of Kayne’s axiom does for the complex linguistic object what the ground does for the mobile: it tells us how to map the unordered set of terms into a sequence of PF slots. But even if Chomsky’s reasoning helps us deduce the formal part of the axiom (assuming that PF demands linearization), the question remains of exactly how the mapping works. Kayne is explicit about that. Unfairly, I will adapt his ideas to Chomsky’s minimalist “bare phrase structure” (Chomsky avoids committing himself to a deﬁnition in either Chomsky 1995a or 1995c). (1) Linear Correspondence Axiom a. Base step: If commands , then precedes . b. Induction step: If precedes and dominates , then precedes . 45

DERIVATIONS

I will discuss each of the steps in (1) in turn, with an eye toward deducing their substantive character from either bare output or economy considerations. Consider why command should be a sufﬁcient condition for precedence. It is best to ask this question with a formal object in mind. I will call this object a command unit (CU), for the simple reason that it emerges in a derivation through the continuous application of Merge. That is, if we merge elements to an already merged phrase marker, then we obtain a CU, as in (2a). In contrast, (2b) is not a CU, since it implies the application of Merge to different objects. (2) a. Command unit: formed by continuous application of Merge to the same object {, { , {, {, {…}}}}} →↑← {, {, {…}}} →↑← {…} b. Not a command unit: formed by discontinuous application of Merge to two separately assembled objects {, {{ , { , { …}}}, {, {, {…}}}}} { , { , { …}}} →↑← {, {, {…}}} →↑← { …} →↑← {…} Regarding CUs, the ultimate question is why, among the possible linearizations in (3), (3d) is chosen. {, …}

(3) a.

{, …}

b.

{, …}

{, …}

{, …}

{, …}

c.

{, …}

d. {, …}

e.

{, …}

{, …}

{, …}

{, …}

{, …}

f.

{, …}

{, …} {, …}

{, …}

{, …}

To continue with the mobile image, there are n! ways in which we can lay it on the ground, for n the number of hanging elements. Why is it that, among all the 46

MULTIPLE SPELL-OUT

apparently reasonable permutations, the linguistic mobile collapses into a linearized sequence speciﬁcally in the order , , {…}? We may ask the question from the point of view of what syntactic relations are relevant to the terminals of the structures in (3). Concentrating on the terminals, we see that the only relation that exists between them in a CU is “I have merged with your ancestors.” We can produce an order within CUs in terms of this relation, which essentially keeps track of what has merged with what when. This is, essentially, the insight behind Epstein’s (1999) interpretation of command, which has the effect of ordering the terminal objects in (3) as follows: , , {…}. If PF requirements demand that the Merge mobile collapse into a ﬂat object, it is not unreasonable to expect that the collapse piggybacks on a previously existing relation. Indeed, minimalist assumptions lead us to expect precisely this sort of parsimony. However, we have not yet achieved the desired results. To see this, imagine a group of people trapped inside a building, with access to a window that allows them to exit just one at a time. These people may order themselves according to some previously existing relation (e.g. age). But having found an order does not mean having decided how to leave the building. Does the youngest exit ﬁrst or last – or in the middle? Likewise, a decision has to be made with regard to the , , {…} order. Exactly how do we map it to the PF order? In minimalist terms, the question is not just how to map the collapsed , , {…} sequence to a PF order, but actually how to do it optimally. The hope is that mapping the collapsed , , {…} command order to the , , {…} PF order in (3d) is (one among) the best solution(s). Another analogy might help clarify the intuition. Visualize a house of cards, and imagine how pulling out one crucial card makes it collapse. To a reasonable extent, the order in which the cards fall maps homomorphically to the order in which they were assembled, with higher cards landing on top, and cards placed on the left or right falling more or less in those directions (assuming no forces other than gravity). If Merge operations could be conceived as producing what amounts to a merge-wave of terminals, it is not unreasonable to expect such a wave to collapse into a linearized terminal sequence in a way that harmonizes (in the same local direction) the various wave states, thus essentially mapping the merge order into the PF linear order in a homomorphic way. This, of course, is handwaving until one establishes what such a merge-wave is, but I will not go into that here (see Martin and Uriagereka (forthcoming), on the concept of collapsed waves in syntax). Even if we managed to collapse the merge order into the PF sequence that most directly reﬂects it, why have we chosen (3d) over the equally plausible (3a)? In short, why does the command relation collapse into precedence, and not the opposite? The harmonized collapse problem seems to have not one optimal solution, but two. Three different answers are possible. First, one can attribute the choice of (3d) over (3a) to something deep; it would have to be as deep as whatever explains the forward movement of time. (I am not entirely joking here; physical 47

DERIVATIONS

properties are taken by many biologists to affect core aspects of the morphology of organisms, and Kayne (1994) speculates in this direction.) Second, one can say (assuming that (3a) and (3d) are equally optimal solutions) that (3d) gave humans an adaptive edge of some sort, in terms of parsing or perhaps learnability. One could also imagine that a species that had chosen (3a) over (3d) as a collapsing technique might equally well have evolved a parser and an acquisition device for the relevant structures (but see Weinberg 1999). Third, one can shrug one’s shoulders. So what if (3a) and (3d) are equally harmonic? Two equally valid solutions exist, so pick the one that does the work. (This view of the world would be very consistent with Stephen Jay Gould’s punctuated equilibrium perspective in biology; see Uriagereka 1998 and Chapter 8.) This situation is acceptable within the Minimalist Program, or for that matter within any program that seeks to understand how optimality works in nature, which cannot reasonably seek the best solution to optimality problems, but instead expects an optimal solution; often, even mathematically optimal solutions are various. If I am ultimately on the right track, (3d) can correctly be chosen as the actual PF ordering that the system employs; that is, we should not need to state (1a) as an axiom. In a nutshell, command maps to a PF linearization convention in simple CUs (those (1a) is designed to target) because this state of affairs is optimal. I will not claim I have proven this, for I have only indicated the direction in which a demonstration could proceed, raising some obvious questions. I have little more to say about this here and will proceed on the assumption that the base step of the LCA can be turned into a theorem.

2 Deducing the induction step of the LCA Having met the demands of the Minimalist Program by showing how part of the LCA can reduce to more justiﬁable conditions, we should naturally ask whether the whole LCA can be deduced this way. I know of no deduction of the sort sketched above, given standard assumptions about the model. Nonetheless, an older model provides an intriguing way of deducing the LCA.1 For reasons that become apparent shortly, I refer to it as a dynamically split model. The origins of this outlook are discussions about successive cyclicity and whether this condition affects interpretation. Are the interpretive components accessed in successive derivational cascades? Much of this debate was abandoned the moment a single level, S-Structure, was postulated as the interface to the interpretive components. Now that S-Structure has itself been abandoned, the question is alive again. What would it mean for the system to access the interpretation split in a dynamic way? I want to demonstrate that the simplest assumption (i.e. nothing prevents a dynamically split access to interpretation) allows the LCA’s induction step to be satisﬁed trivially. In effect, this would permit the deduction of (1b), albeit in a drastically changed model that neither Chomsky (1995c) nor Kayne (1994) was assuming. 48

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One way of framing the issue is to ask how many times the rule of Spell-out should apply. If we stipulate that it applies only once, then PF and LF are accessed only once, at that point. On the other hand, liberally accessing PF and LF in successive derivational cascades entails multiple applications of Spell-out. Surely, assuming that computational steps are costly, economy considerations favor a single application of Spell-out. But are there circumstances in which a derivation is forced to spell out different chunks of structure in different steps? One such instance might arise when a derivation involves more than one CU. As noted, CUs emerge as the derivational process unfolds, and they are trivially collapsible by means of the base step of the LCA. Now, what if only those trivially linearizable chunks of structure (e.g. (2a)) are in fact linearized? That is, what if, instead of complicating the LCA by including (1b), when we encounter a complex structure of the sort in (2b) we simply do not collapse it (thus linearizing it), causing a derivational crash? Only two results are then logically possible: either structures like (2b) do not exist, or they are linearized in various steps, each of which involves only CUs. The ﬁrst possibility is factually wrong, so we conclude that Multiple Spell-Out (MSO) is an alternative. Before we explore whether MSO is empirically desirable, consider its possible mechanics. Bear in mind that CUs are singly spelled out – the most economical alternative. The issue, then, is what happens beyond CUs. By assumption, we have no way of collapsing them into given linearizations, so we must do the job prior to their merger, when they are still individual CUs. What we need, then, is a procedure to relate a structure that has already been spelled out to the still “active” phrase marker. Otherwise, we cannot assemble a ﬁnal uniﬁed and linearized object. The procedure for relating CUs can be conceived in conservative or radical terms, either solution being consistent with the program in this chapter. The conservative proposal is based on the fact that the collapsed Merge structure is no longer phrasal, after Spell-out; in essence, the phrase marker that has undergone Spell-out is like a giant lexical compound, whose syntactic terms are obviously interpretable but are not accessible to movement, ellipsis and so forth.2 The radical proposal assumes that each spelled-out CU does not even merge with the rest of the structure, the ﬁnal process of interphrasal association being accomplished in the performative components.3 I will detail brieﬂy each of these versions. In the conservative version, the spelled-out phrase marker behaves like a word, so that it can associate with the rest of the structure; this means it must keep its label after Spell-out. Technically, if a phrase marker {, {L, K}} collapses through Spell-out, the result is {, L, K}, which is mathematically equivalent to {, {{L}, {L, K}}}.4 Since this object is not a syntactic object, it clearly can behave like a “frozen” compound. As a consequence, we need not add any further stipulations: the collapsing procedure of Spell-out itself results in something akin to a word. To see how we reach this conclusion, we need to take seriously Chomsky’s (1995c) notion of syntactic object. Syntactic objects can take two forms. 49

DERIVATIONS

(4) a. Base: A word is a syntactic object. b. Induction: {, {L, K}} is a syntactic object, for L and K syntactic objects and a label. (4a) speaks for itself, although it is not innocent. The general instance is not too complicated: a word is an item from the lexicon. However, the Minimalist Program permits the formation of complex words, whose internal structure and structural properties are not determined by the syntax. (Indeed, the object resulting from Spell-out also qualiﬁes as a word, in the technical sense of having a label and a structure that is inaccessible to the syntax.) (4b) is obtained through Merge and involves a labeling function that Chomsky argues is necessarily projection. What is relevant here is how a label is structurally expressed. (5) Within a syntactic object, a label is not a term. (6) K is a term if and only if (a) or (b): a. Base: K is a phrase marker. b. Induction: K is a member of a member of a term. (6a) hides no secrets. (6b) is based on the sort of object that is obtained by merging K and L: one set containing K and L, and another containing {L, K} and label – namely, {, {L, K}. This whole object (a phrase marker) is a term, by (6a). Members of members of this term (L and K) are also terms, by (6b). Label is a member of the ﬁrst term, hence not a term. All of these results are as desired. Consider next the collapse of {, {L, K}} as {, L, K}, equivalent to {, {{L}, {L, K}}}. By (6b), {L} and {L, K} are terms. However, {L, K} is not a syntactic object, by either (4a) or (4b). Therefore, {a, {{L}, {L, K}}} cannot be a syntactic object by (4b); if it is to be merged higher up, it can be a syntactic object only by (4a) – as a word. This is good; we want the collapsed object to be like a compound, that is, essentially a word: it has a label, and it has terms, but they are not objects accessible to the syntax. Note that set-theoretic notions have been taken very seriously here; for example, such notions as linearity have been expressed without any coding tricks (angled brackets, as opposed to particular sets). In essence, the discussion has revealed that generally merged structures (those that go beyond the headcomplement relation) are fundamentally nonlinear, to the point that linearizing them literally destroys their phrasal base. This conclusion lends some credibility to Chomsky’s conjectures that (a) Merge produces a completely basic and merely associative set-theoretic object, with no internal ordering, and (b) only if collapsed into a ﬂat structure can this unordered object be interpreted at PF. Though the current notation does the job, the appropriate results can be achieved regardless of the notation. Various positions can be taken, the most radical having been mentioned already. In the version that ships spelled-out phrase markers to performance, one must assume a procedure by which already processed (henceforth, “cashed out”) phrase markers ﬁnd their way “back” to 50

MULTIPLE SPELL-OUT

their interpretation site. Plausibly, this is the role agreement plays in the grammar. It is interesting to note that, according to present assumptions, MSO applies to noncomplements (which are not part of CUs). Similarly, agreement does not manifest itself in complements, which makes it reasonable to suppose that what agreement does is “glue together” separate derivational cascades that are split at Spell-out, the way an address links two separate computers. In either version of MSO, we have now deduced (1b), which stipulates that the elements dominated by in a CU precede whatever precedes. That should precede or be preceded by the other elements in its CU was shown in Section 1. The fact that the elements dominated by act as does within its CU is a direct consequence of the fact that has been spelled out separately from the CU it is attached to, in a different derivational cascade. The elements dominated by cannot interact with those that interacts with, in the “mother” CU. Thus, their place in the structure is as frozen under ’s dominance as would be the place of the members of a compound , the syllables of a word , or worse still, elements that have already “gone to performance.”5 I should point out one ﬁnal, important assumption I am making. The situation we have been considering can be schematized as in (7). But what prevents a projection like the one in (8)? (7)

XP Merge Spell-out

YP Y

X' X

…

…

(8)

YP Merge Spell-out

Y' Y

X' X

…

…

In (8), it is the spelled-out category Y that projects a YP. This results in forcing the linearization of X’s projection prior to that of Y’s, contrary to fact. The problem is somewhat familiar. In systems with a single Spell-out, both Kayne and Chomsky must resort to ad hoc solutions to avoid this sort of undesired result involving speciﬁers. Kayne eliminates the distinction between adjuncts and speciﬁers,6 and Chomsky deﬁnes command in a peculiar way: only for heads and maximal projections, although intermediate projections must be “taken into account” as well.7 Within the conservative implementation of MSO, (8) can be prevented if 51

DERIVATIONS

only lexical items project. Again, MSO is designed to collapse a phrase marker into a compound of sorts. Yet this “word” cannot be seen as an item that projects any further; it can merge with something else, but it can never be the item that supports further lexical dependencies. This might relate to some of Chomsky’s (2000) conjectures regarding a fundamental asymmetry indirectly involved in the labeling of the Merge function; in particular, it may be that Merge (like Move) implies a form of Attract, where certain properties of one of the merging items are met by the other. It is conceivable that properties relevant to Attract are “active” only in lexical items within the lexical array, or numeration, that leads to a derivation, and not in words formed in the course of the derivation. This would include collapsed units of the sort discussed here, but it may extend as well to complex predicate formation, which is typically capped off after it takes place (there is no complex complex-predicate formation, and so on).8 At any rate, the price to pay for unequivocal attachment of spelled-out noncomplements is to have two (perhaps not unreasonable) notions of terminals: lexicon-born ones and derived ones. Under the radically performative interpretation of MSO, there is a trivial reason why a spelled-out chunk of structure should not project: it is gone from the syntax. The price to pay for equivocal attachment of spelled-out noncomplements is, as noted earlier, the agreement of these elements with corresponding heads.

3 Some predictions for derivations I have essentially shown how the base step of the LCA may follow from economy, and how the induction step may follow from a minimalist architecture that makes central use of MSO, thus yielding dynamically bifurcated access to interpretive components. Given the central position it accords CUs, this architecture makes certain predictions. In a nutshell, command is important because it is only within CUs that syntactic terms “communicate” with each other, in a derivational cascade. To get a taste of this sort of prediction, consider Chomsky’s (1995c) notion of distance, which is sensitive to command. The reason for involving command in the characterization of distance is empirical and concerns superiority effects of the following sort: (9) a. b. c. d.

who t saw what *what did who see t which professor t saw which student which student did which professor see t

Chomsky’s account capitalizes on the simple fact that the competing whelements (who, what, which) stand in a command relation in (9a,b), but clearly not in (9c,d), as (10a) and (10b) show, respectively.9 (10) a. [C [who … [saw what]]] b. [C [[which professor] … [saw [which student]]]] 52

MULTIPLE SPELL-OUT

Thus, he deﬁnes distance in terms of the following proviso: (11) Only if commands can be closer to a higher than is. This is the case in (10a): the target C is closer to who than to what. Crucially, though, in (10b) the target C is as close to the which in which professor as it is to the which in which student; these positions being equidistant from C, both movements in (9c) and (9d) are allowed, as desired. Needless to say, this solution works. But why should this be? Why is command relevant? In MSO terms, the explanation is direct. The two wh-elements in (10a) belong to the same derivational cascade, since they are assembled through Merge into the same CU. This is not true of the two wh-phrases in (10b); in particular, which professor and which student are assembled in different CUs and hence do not compete within the same derivational space (I return below to how the wh-features in each instance are even accessible). The fact that the phrases are equally close to the target C is thus expected, being architecturally true, and need not be stated in a deﬁnition of distance. It might seem that this idea does not carry through to the radically performative interpretation of MSO; but in fact it does. Even if which professor in (10) is in some sense gone from the syntactic computation, the relevant (here, wh-) feature that is attracted to the periphery of the clause stays accessible, again for reasons that I return to shortly. The general architectural reasoning that determines what information is and is not gone from the computation extends to classical restrictions on extraction domains, which must be complements.10 The contrast in (12) is extremely problematic for the Minimalist Program. (12) a. […X […t…]] e.g. who did you see [a critic of t] b. [[…t…] X…] e.g. *who did [a critic of t] see you The problem is that whatever licenses (12a) in terms of the Minimal Link Condition or last resort should also license (12b); so what is wrong with the latter? A minimalist should not simply translate the observation in (12) into a new principle; such a principle must again fall within the general desiderata of the program – and thus reduce to economy or bare output conditions. I know of no minimalist way of explaining the contrast in (12).11 But now consider the problem from the MSO perspective. A complement is very different from any other dependent of a head in that the elements a complement dominates are within the same CU of the “governing” head, whereas this is not true for the elements a noncomplement dominates. As a result, extraction from a complement can occur within the same derivational cascade, whereas extraction from a noncomplement cannot, given my assumptions. Basically, the following paradox arises. If a noncomplement is spelled out independently from its head, any extraction from the noncomplement will involve material from something that is not even a syntactic object (or, more radically, 53

DERIVATIONS

not even there); thus, it should be as hard as extracting part of a compound (or worse). On the other hand, if the noncomplement is not spelled out in order to allow extraction from it, then it will not be possible to collapse its elements, always assuming that the only procedure for linearization is the command – precedence correspondence that economy considerations sanction. Of course, one might now wonder how such simple structures as (13) can ever be generated, with movement of a complex wh-phrase. (13) [[which professor] [did you say [t left]]] If, for the collapse of a complex noncomplement’s elements to be sanctioned, they must be spelled out before they merge with the rest of the phrase marker, how can movement of noncomplements exist? Should such elements not be pronounced where they are spelled out? (14) *[did you say [[which professor] left]] The answer to this puzzle relates to the pending question of wh-feature accessibility in spelled-out phrases. I address both matters in the following section.

4 General predictions for the interpretive components The dynamically split model that MSO involves produces derivational cascades, each of which reaches the interpretive components in its own derivational life. If this model is correct, we should see some evidence of the relevant dynamics. Let us start with PF matters. The ﬁrst sort of prediction that comes to mind relates to work by Cinque (1993), which goes back to Chomsky’s (1972) observations on focus “projections.” Generally speaking, the focus that manifests itself on a (complement) “right branch” may project higher up in the phrase marker, whereas this is not the case for the focus that manifests itself on a (noncomplement) “left branch.” For instance, consider (15). (15) a. Michaelangelo painted THOSE FRESCOES b. MICHAELANGELO painted those frescoes (15a) can answer several questions: “What did Michaelangelo paint?”, “What did Michaelangelo do?”, and even “What happened?” In contrast, (15b) can only answer the question “Who painted those frescoes?” Why? The architecture discussed here is very consistent with the asymmetry, regardless of the ultimate nature of focal “projection” or spreading (about which I will say nothing). The main contribution that MSO can make to the matter is evident: for this model, focus can only spread within a CU – that is, through a “right branch.” Spreading up a “left branch” would involve moving across two different CUs and hence would be an instance of a “crossdimensional” communication between different elements.12 There are other phonological domains that conform to this picture, predicting that a pause or a parenthetical phrase will sound natural between subject and predicate, for instance, or between any phrase and its adjuncts. 54

MULTIPLE SPELL-OUT

(16) a. Natural: Michaelangelo . . . painted those frescoes Unnatural or emphatic: Michaelangelo painted . . . those frescoes b. Natural: Michaelangelo painted those frescoes . . . in Florence Unnatural or emphatic, or different in interpretation: Michaelangelo painted . . . those frescoes in Florence The same results are obtained by replacing the dots in (16) with standard ﬁllers like you know, I’m told, or I’ve heard (see Selkirk 1984). There are interesting complications, too. For example, Kaisse (1985) and Nespor and Vogel (1986) suggest that functional items phonologically associate to the lexical head they govern. Consider the examples in (17), from Lebeaux (1996), where underlined items are phonologically phrased together. (17) a. John may have seen Mary b. the picture of Mary These sorts of paradigms are compatible with the MSO proposal, although something else must be responsible for the cliticization (note, within a given CU). One can think of harder cases. A particularly difﬁcult one from Galician is mentioned in Uriagereka (1988a). (18) vimo-los pallasos chegar saw.we-the clowns arrive “We saw the clowns arrive.” In this language, determiners surprisingly cliticize to previous, often thematically nonrelated heads; in (18), for instance, the determiner introducing the embedded subject attaches to the verb that takes as internal argument the reduced clause that this subject is part of. The sort of analysis I have given elsewhere (Uriagereka 1988a, 1996), whereby the determiner syntactically moves to the position shown in (18), is contrary to expectations, given my present account of the paradigm in (12). Otero (1996) gives reasons to believe that the determiner cliticization cannot be syntactic, but is instead a late morphophonological process; if my present analysis is correct, then Otero’s general conclusion must also be correct. Otero’s suggestion is in fact compatible with the general MSO architecture, so long as prosodic phrasing is allowed to take place after Spell-out, naturally enough in terms of the edges of “adjacent” (or successively spelled out) cascades of structure (see Otero (1996: 316); Lasnik (1995); and more generally Bobaljik (1995) and references cited there). This is straightforward for the conservative version of MSO, but is possible as well in the radical version, so long as prosody is a unifying mechanism in performance (in the same league as agreement, in the sense above). In fact, the radical version of MSO can rather naturally account for the variant of (18) given in (19). (19) *vimo-los pallasos chegaren (but OK: vimos os pallasos chegaren) saw.we-the clowns arrive.they “We saw the clowns arrive.” 55

DERIVATIONS

A minor change in the form of (18) – introducing agreement in the inﬁnitival, the -en morpheme after chegar “arrive” – makes the determiner cliticization impossible. This can be explained if the cliticization is a form of agreement, in which case the subject of the embedded clause in (19) is forced to agree with two elements at once: the inﬂected inﬁnitival and the matrix verb. If agreement is indeed an address, as is expected in the radical version of MSO, the kind of duplicity in (19) is unwanted; see the Agreement Criterion below.13 Needless to say, this bird’s-eye view of the problem does little justice to the complex issues involved in prosodic phrasing, not to mention liaison, phrasal stress, pausing, and other related topics. My only intention has been to point out what is perhaps already obvious: within the MSO system, “left branches” should be natural bifurcation points for PF processes, if the present architecture is correct. At the same time, if we ﬁnd “communication” across the outputs of derivational cascades, the natural thing to do is attribute it to performative (at any rate, post-Spell-out) representations, plausibly under cascade adjacency. Similar issues arise for the LF component, where immediate predictions can be made and rather interesting problems again arise. The general prediction should by now be rather obvious: CUs are natural domains for LF phenomena. This is true for a variety of processes (binding of different sorts, obviation, scopal interactions, negative polarity licensing); it is indeed much harder to ﬁnd instances of LF processes that do not involve command than otherwise. (Though there are such instances, to which I return.) More importantly, we must observe that CUs are just a subcase of the situations where command emerges. A problematic instance is patent in a now familiar structure, (20). (20)

M J

… N L

K

… H …

…

Although J and H are not part of the same CU (the latter is part of a CU dominated by L), J commands H. Empirically, we want the relation in (20) to hold in cases of antecedence, where J tries to be H’s antecedent (every boy thinks that [his father] hates him). The question is, if J and H are in different “syntactic dimensions” – after L is spelled out – how can J ever relate to H? The logic of the system forces an answer that is worth pursuing: there are aspects of the notion of antecedence that are irreducibly nonderivational. This might mean that antecedence is a semantic or pragmatic notion; either way, we are pushing it out of the architecture seen thus far – at least in part. The hedge is 56

MULTIPLE SPELL-OUT

needed because we still want antecedence to be sensitive to command, even if it does not hold within the CUs that determine derivational cascades. As it turns out, the dynamically split system has a bearing on this as well. Essentially, we want to be able to say that J in (20) can be the antecedent of H, but H cannot antecede anything within K. The radical and the conservative versions of the proposal deal with this matter differently, as follows. For the conservative view, recall that although L in (20) is not a syntactic object after Spell-out, it does have internal structure, and its information is not lost. To see this in detail, suppose that before Spell-out, L had the internal structure of his father, that is, {his, {his, father}}. After Spell-out, the structure becomes {his, his, father}, equivalent to {his, {{his}, {his, father}}}. By (6b), we can identify {his} and {his, father} as terms (and see Note 4). This is an important fact because, although the linearized object is not a syntactic object, it contains terms, which the system can identify if not operate with: they do not constitute a licit structure.14 The point is, if the relation of antecedence is based on the identiﬁcation of a term like {his}, even the linearized structure does the job, inaccessible as it is to any further syntactic operation. (This highlights, I believe, the fact that accessibility is not the same as interpretability.) But consider the converse situation, where in spite of H’s being a term in (21), it cannot be the antecedent of L or K.15 (21)

M J

…

… H …

N

L

K

This suggests that ’s antecedent be characterized as in (22). (22) Where is a term in a derivational cascade D, a term, is ’s antecedent only if has accessed interpretation in D. This determination of ’s antecedent is derivational, unlike the notion term in (6), which is neutral with respect to whether it is characterized derivationally or not. It is worth noting that (22) is suggested as part of a deﬁnition, not of antecedence, but of antecedent of .16 The formal aspects of the notion in (22) are compatible with the system presented thus far, but its substantive character – that only a term that accesses LF in D can be an antecedent of the terms in D – does not follow from the architecture, at least in its conservative shape. Under the radical version of the MSO architecture, the internal structure of the spelled-out phrase is not relevant, since in this instance the phrasal architecture of the syntactic object need not be destroyed (what guarantees inaccessibility is the fact that the phrase has been sent to performance). In turn, this version has an intriguing way of justifying (22). 57

DERIVATIONS

As noted earlier, a problem for the performative approach is how to associate cashed-out structures to the positions where they make the intended sense. Antecedence as a process may be intricately related to this association problem. Simply put, the system ships structure X to the interpretive components; later, it comes up with structure Y, within which X must meaningfully ﬁnd its place. This presupposes an addressing technique, so that X “knows” where in Y it belongs; by hypothesis, agreement is the relevant technique. It is natural, then, that X as a whole should seek a place within a part of Y. Now consider (22), and let be a term within an active structure Y, and an already cashed-out term (either X itself or part of it). Why should be the antecedent of only if accesses interpretation in Y’s derivational cascade? To answer this question, observe, ﬁrst of all, that the performative version of MSO makes slightly more sense if the system works “top-down” than if it works “bottom-up.” Chomsky (2000) discusses this type of system and correctly points out that it is perfectly reasonable within present assumptions; Drury (1998) develops one such alternative. The only point that is relevant here is whether a series of noncomplements are sent to performance starting from the root of the phrase marker or from its foot. The logic of the system always forces a given noncomplement to access performance prior to the CU it associates with. Suppose this “top-down” behavior is generalized, so that the ﬁrst noncomplement after the root of the phrase marker is shipped to performance ﬁrst, the second noncomplement next, and so on, until ﬁnally the remaining structure is cashed out. With regard to antecedence, then, (22) amounts to this: for to be ’s antecedent, must have been sent to performance before – in fact, in a derivational cascade that is “live” through the address mechanism of agreement. In other words, antecedence presupposes agreement, which is very consistent with the well-known diachronic fact that agreement systems are grammaticalizations of antecedence/pronoun relations (see Barlow and Fergusson 1988). The intuition is that agreement is merely a pointer between two phrase markers, one that is gone from the system, and one that is still active in syntactic terms. Material within the cashed-out phrase marker is “out of sight”; the system only sees the unit as a whole for conceptual – intentional reasons (as the label that hooks up the agreement mechanism), and perhaps the phonological edges (under adjacency among cascades) for articulatory – perceptual reasons. Consequently, just as prosodic adjustments can take place only in the visible edges of the cashed-out material, so antecedence can be established only via the visible top of the phrase that establishes agreement with the syntactically active phrase (cf. (21)). The fact that the variable bound by the antecedent can be inside a cashed-out noncomplement (as in (20)) is perfectly reasonable if this variable serves no syntactic purpose vis-à-vis the antecedent. Differently put, whereas the syntactically active part of the structure needs to know where the antecedent is, it does not need to know precisely where the variable is, so long as it is interpretable within the cashed-out structure. This makes sense. The antecedent is a unique element 58

MULTIPLE SPELL-OUT

that determines the referential or quantiﬁcational properties of an expression; in contrast, the variable (a) is not unique (many semantic variables can be associated with a given antecedent) and (b) serves no purpose beyond its own direct association to some particular predicate – it determines nothing for other parts of the structure. In sum, if the radical MSO view is correct, antecedence is a semantic process that is paratactically instantiated through the transderivational phenomenon of agreement: the antecedent must syntactically agree (abstractly, of course; the agreement may or may not be realized morphologically with the structure that contains its associated variable). There is no structural restriction on the variable,17 although semantically it will be a successful variable only if it happens to match up with the agreement features of its antecedent.

5 How noncomplements can move Consider next a question we left pending: why (13), repeated here, is perfect. (23) [[which professor] [did you say [t left]]] Let us ﬁrst evaluate this example from the perspective of the radical version of MSO. Strictly speaking, the phrase which professor is never directly connected to the structure above it – not even to the predicate left. Rather, it agrees with the relevant connecting points, which are presumably occupied by some categorial placeholder [D] (much in the spirit of ideas that go back to Lebeaux 1988). It is [D] that receives a -role, moves to a Case-checking position, and eventually ends up in the wh-site – which must mean that [D] hosts thematic, Case, and wh-information, at least. It is thus not that surprising, from this perspective, that the wh-feature should be accessible to the system even after the spelling out of which professor (wherever it takes place), since what stays accessible is not an element within which professor, but an element the [D] category carries all along, which eventually matches up with the appropriate features of which professor, as in (24). (24) [which professor]i … [[D]i [you say [[D]i left]]] An immediate question is why the “minitext” in (24) is not pronounced as follows: (25) [[D]i [you say [[D]i left]]] … [which professor]i Reasonably, though, this relates again to the phenomenon of antecedence, and in particular the familiarity/novelty condition; in speech, information that sets up a discourse comes before old or anaphoric information (see Hoffman 1996 for essentially this idea). A second question relates to the Condition on Extraction Domain (CED) effect account. Why can (12b) not now be salvaged as in (26a)? Strictly, (26a) cannot be linearized, since the subject of see you is too complex. But suppose we proceed in two steps, as in (26b). 59

DERIVATIONS

(26) a. [who]i … [[a critic of [D]i] see you] b. [who]j … [a critic of [D]j]i … [[D]i see you] There is a minimal, yet important, difference between (26b) and (20), where we do want J to relate to H as its antecedent. Whereas there is a relation of grammar that tries to connect who and [D] (the equivalent of its trace) in (26b), no relation of grammar connects an antecedent J to a bound variable H in (20). In other words, we want the long-distance relation in (26b) to be akin to movement, but clearly not in (20). But how is long-distance movement captured in the radical version of MSO, if we allow associations like the one in (24), where which professor has never been inside the skeletal phrase? The key is the [D] element, which moves to the relevant sites and associates via agreement to whatever phrase has been cashed out. In (26b), the [D] inside a critic of must associate to who (alternatively, if of who is a complement of critic, this element moves out directly – but see Note 14). Now, how does who associate to the matrix C position? If who associates inside a critic of, then it does not associate in the matrix C; conversely, if who associates in the matrix C, as a question operator, then it cannot associate inside a critic of. The only way an element like who can grammatically relate to two or more positions at once – that is, to -, Case, or wh-positions – is if all these positions are syntactically connected, in which case it is the [D] element that moves through them and eventually associates to who. This, of course, is what happens in the perfect (12a), repeated here. (27) [who]i … [[D]i [you see [a critic of [D]i]]] Here again, agreement uniqueness is at play, as I speculatively suggested regarding the ungrammaticality of (19). This important point can be stated explicitly as follows: (28) Agreement Criterion A phrase that determines agreement in a phrase cannot at the same time determine agreement in a phrase . This criterion is tantamount to saying that agreement is a rigidly unique address. It may well be that (28) follows from deeper information – theoretic matters, but I will not pursue that possibility here.18 The conservative version of MSO can also account successfully for (23), although (naturally) with assumptions that do not bear on agreement considerations and instead introduce very different operational mechanics. As before, the issue is to somehow have access to which professor, even though this phrase must also be sent to Spell-out if it attaches as a noncomplement. This statement looks contradictory; but whether it is or not depends on exactly how the details of movement are assumed to work. Consider whether the two steps involved in movement – copying some material and then merging it – must immediately feed one another, within a given derivation. Suppose we assume that move is a collection of operations, as 60

MULTIPLE SPELL-OUT

several researchers have recently argued (see, e.g. Kitahara 1994; Nunes 1995). Thus, movement of a complex phrase marker may proceed in several steps – for example, as in (29). (29) a. Copy one of two independently merged phrases L

L

K

…

…

copy …

b. Spell out the lower copy as trace L

L [Ø]

K

…

…

c. Merge the trace N L

L [Ø]

K

…

…

d. Merge the higher copy (possibly in a separate derivation) M L

…

…

N L [Ø]

K …

The key is the “in parallel” strategy implicit in (29a,b); the rest of the steps are straightforward. So let us see whether those initial steps can be justiﬁed. Technically, what takes place in (29a,b) is, at least at ﬁrst sight, the same as what takes place in the formation of a phrase marker as in (30). (30) a. Numeration: {the, a, man, saw, woman, …} b. the saw the

man

saw

a a

woman

Prior to merging [the man] and [saw [a woman]], the system must assemble them in separate, completely parallel derivational spaces; there is no way of 61

DERIVATIONS

avoiding this, assuming Merge and standard phrasal properties of DPs and VPs. (29a) capitalizes on this possibility; instead of copying lexical items from the numeration, as in (30), in (29a) the system copies the items from the assembled phrase marker. In turn, (29b) employs the option of deleting phonetic material, thus making it unavailable for PF interpretation. It is reasonable to ask why this step is involved, but the question is no different from that posed by Nunes (1999), concerning why the copy of K in (31) is not pronounced when K is moved. (31) a. [K…[…K…]…] b. [K…[…[Ø]…]…] Why is who did you see not pronounced who did you see who? After all, if movement is copying plus deletion, why is deletion necessary, particularly at PF? Nunes’s answer capitalizes on the LCA, by assuming that identical copies are indeed identical. Hence, Kayne’s linearization question has no solution; for instance, in the above example does who command, or is it commanded by, you? It depends on which who we are talking about. One is tempted to treat each of these as a token of a lexical type, but they are not; each who (other than the lexically inserted occurrence) emerges as a result of mere derivational dynamics. Then there is no solution unless, Nunes reasons, the system deletes one of the copies on its way to PF (the place where linearization is required in Chomsky’s system). If only one copy of who is left, the linearization answer is trivial: in standard terms, the remaining copy precedes whatever it commands.19 (29b) has the same justiﬁcation as Nunes’s copy deletion. Note that if the system does not spell out the lower copy of L as a trace, when it reaches the stage represented in (29d), it will not be able to determine whether L commands or is commanded by all other elements in the phrase marker, and thus this object will not collapse into a valid PF realization. In effect, then, there is a way to keep something like which professor accessible even if it starts its derivational life as a subject, by making a copy of it in advance and having that copy be the one that merges in the ultimate Spell-out site, the other(s) being spelled out as trace(s). A question remains, however: why can this procedure not provide a gambit for escaping the ungrammaticality of CED effects? For example, what prevents the following grammatical derivation of (26)? 1 2 3 4 5

Assemble see you and a critic of who. Copy who in parallel. Realize the ﬁrst copy of who as a trace. Merge a critic of t to see you and all the way up to the C projection. Attach the stored copy of who as the speciﬁer of C.

A way to prevent this unwanted derivation capitalizes on the desire to limit the globality of computational operations, as argued for in Chomsky (2000) and references cited there (see also Chapter 4). Step 2 in the derivation is clearly very 62

MULTIPLE SPELL-OUT

global: at the point of merging who, the system must know that this element will be attracted further up in the phrase marker – in a completely different derivational cascade. Crucially, the system cannot wait until the matrix C appears in order to make a copy (in a parallel derivational space) of who, thereby making the already attached copy of who silent (i.e. a trace); in particular, it cannot simply go back to the site of who and add the instruction to delete after it has abandoned the “cycle” a critic of who, since that operation would be countercyclic. It is literally when the “lower” who attaches that the system must know to take it as a trace (cf. (29)), which entails that the system must have access to the C that attracts who, even when it has not yet left the numeration. Let us again consider all the relevant examples side by side (CUs are boxed, trace copies are parenthesized). (32)

a.

which professor C you see a critic of (which professor)

b.

which professor C you say ( which professor ) left

c. * which professor C a critic of (which professor) see you (32a) is straightforward. Before the movement of which professor, the sentence involves a single CU, within which C trivially attracts the necessary wh-feature; after which professor pied-pipes along with this wh-feature, a new CU emerges, which is of no particular interest. (32b) and (32c) are more complicated, since they involve two CUs prior to wh-movement. The issue is how they differ. We saw earlier that the derivation in (32c) cannot proceed cyclically if it is allowed to go all the way up to the CP level, then to return to the lower which professor and delete it. Rather, at the point when which professor attaches, the system must know that it is being (overtly) attracted by C and hence must copy it in parallel and attach the initial copy as a trace. The same is true of which professor in (32b), but there C and (the entire phrase) which professor are at least part of the same CU, whereas in (32c) (the entire phrase) which professor is part of the CU of a critic of which professor, and C is not. This must be the key: as expected, only elements within the same CU can relate. But then, is (33) still not a problem? (33) a critic of which professor saw you (34) a critic of which professor C ( a critic of which professor ) see you The difference between (32c) and (33)/(34) is this. In the former, the system must decide to copy which professor as a trace while in the CU of a critic of 63

DERIVATIONS

which professor. In the latter, it is not which professor but a critic of which professor that is copied as a trace; hence, the system can reach the copying decision while in the CU where C is merged – that is, locally. At the same time, deletion of a critic of which professor is a cyclic process if we deﬁne the “cycle” within the conﬁnes of a CU that has not been abandoned. To make matters explicit, I state the following principle: (35) Principle of Strict Cyclicity All syntactic operations take place within the derivational cycles of CUs. In other words, the cascades of derivational activity that we have seen all along are responsible for limiting the class of activities the system engages in, in purely operational terms. Cross-cascade relations of any sort – Attract, Move, backtracking for deletion purposes, or presumably any others – are strictly forbidden by (35); a derivation that violates (35) is immediately canceled.

6 Beyond derivations In both versions of MSO, CUs are crucial. This is explicitly encoded in (35), for the conservative view, and is trivially true in the radical view, where only CUs exist in competence grammar – uniﬁcation of CUs being left for performance. If the present model is anywhere near right, this fact can be used as a wedge to separate various sorts of phenomena; essentially, cyclic ones are syntactic, whereas noncyclic ones are paratactic, or perhaps not syntactic at all. We looked at two of the former: cliticization across CUs in the PF component, and the establishment of antecedent relations in the LF component. Even though these phenomena were suggested not to be strictly derivational, the derivational results were taken to importantly limit the class of possible relations involved in each instance – adjacency of cascades for PF, “top” of CUs for LF – as if syntax carved the path interpretation must blindly follow. But are there situations in which syntax leaves no signiﬁcant imprint on representational shapes? Presumably that would happen, within present assumptions, whenever a systematic phenomenon simply does not care about command, or even exhibits anticommand behavior. Weak crossover may well be one such instance. I want to suggest the possibility of analyzing a typical weak crossover effect, as in (36b), as a violation of the condition on novelty/familiarity, which I take to be pragmatic. (36) a. His friend knocked on the door. A man came in. b. his friend killed a man The familiar his cannot antecede the novel a man in (36b) any more than it can in (36a). This is so, of course, only if we adopt the null hypothesis that the novelty or familiarity of a given ﬁle is assumed not just across separate sentences (36a), but also intrasententially (36b). (This must be the case, virtually by deﬁnition, for the radical version of MSO, for which each separate CU is a text.) 64

MULTIPLE SPELL-OUT

In order to extend this sort of analysis to the examples in (37), we must postulate that the operators which trigger weak crossover involve an existence predicate of the sort postulated by Klima and Kuroda in the 1960s (see Chomsky 1964), which gives them a characteristic indeﬁnite or existential character.20 (37) a. his friend killed everyone b. who did his friend kill That is, the logical form of everyone must be as coded in its morphology: every x, one (x). Something similar must be said about who; this would be consistent with the morphological shape of such elements in East Asian languages (see, e.g. Kim 1991; Watanabe 1992; and references cited there). Then the existence element will induce a novelty effect with regard to the familiar pronoun, as desired. The point I am trying to establish is simple. Postsyntactic machinery may be needed to account for some familiar phenomena. The fact that they involve LF representations in the Government-Binding model does not necessarily force us to treat them as LF phenomena in the present system – so long as we treat them somehow (see Chapter 8). I strongly suspect that Condition C of the Binding Theory is another such phenomenon – as are, more generally, matters pertaining to long-distance processes that are extremely difﬁcult to capture in purely syntactic terms (e.g. some kinds of anaphora, unbounded ellipsis under parallelism).

7 Conclusions The system I have programmatically sketched in this chapter is much more dynamically derivational than its alternative in Chomsky (1995c) (although it approximates the one in Chomsky (2000), to the point of being conceptually indistinguishable). That the system is derivational, and that it is dynamically (or cyclically) so, are both interesting ideas in their own right, with a variety of consequences for locality and the class of representations the architecture allows. Curiously, one consequence (best illustrated in Weinberg 1999) is that the gap between competence and performance is partly bridged, radically so in one version of the program. This has a repercussion for competence: it provides a rationale for the existence of agreement.

65

4 CYCLICITY AND EXTRACTION DOMAINS † with Jairo Nunes 1 Introduction If something distinguishes the Minimalist Program of Chomsky (1995b, 2000) from other models within the principles-and-parameters framework, it is the assumption that the language faculty is an optimal solution to legibility conditions imposed by external systems. Under this perspective, a main desideratum of the program is to derive substantive principles from interface (“bare output”) conditions, and formal principles from economy conditions. It is thus natural that part of the minimalist agenda is devoted to reevaluating the theoretical apparatus developed within the principles-and-parameters framework, with the goal of explaining on more solid conceptual grounds the wealth of empirical material uncovered in past decades. This chapter takes some steps toward this goal by deriving Condition-on-Extraction-Domains (CED) effects (in the sense of Huang 1982) in consonance with these general minimalist guidelines. Within the principles-and-parameters framework, the CED is generally assumed to be a government-based locality condition that restricts movement operations (see Huang 1982 and Chomsky 1986a, for instance). But once the notion of government is abandoned in the Minimalist Program, as it involves nonlocal relations (see Chomsky 1995b: Chapter 3), the data that were accounted for in terms of the CED call for a more principled analysis. Some of the relevant data regarding the CED are illustrated in examples (1)–(3). Example (1) shows that regular extraction out of a subject or an adjunct yields unacceptable results; (2) shows that parasitic gap constructions structurally analogous to (1) are much more acceptable; ﬁnally, (3) shows that if the licit parasitic gaps of (2) are further embedded within a CED island such as an adjunct clause, unacceptable results arise again (see Kayne 1984; Contreras 1984; Chomsky 1986a). (1) a. *[CP [which politician]i [C didQ [IP [pictures of ti] upset the voters]]] b. *[CP [which paper]i [C didQ [IP you read Don Quixote [PP before ﬁling ti]]]] (2) a. [CP [which politician]i [C didQ [IP [pictures of pgi] upset ti]]] b. [CP [which paper]i [C didQ [IP you read ti [PP before ﬁling pgi]]]] 66

CYCLICITY AND EXTRACTION DOMAINS

(3) a. *[CP [which politician]i [C didQ [IP you criticize ti [PP before [pictures of pgi] upset the voters]]]] b. *[CP [which book]i [C didQ [IP you ﬁnally read ti [PP after leaving the bookstore [PP without ﬁnding pgi]]]]] Thus far, the major locality condition explored in the Minimalist Program is the Minimal Link Condition stated in (4) (see Chomsky 1995b: 311). (4) Minimal Link Condition K attracts only if there is no , closer to K than , such that K attracts . The unacceptability of (5a), for instance, is taken to follow from a Minimal Link Condition violation: at the derivational step represented in (5b), the interrogative complementizer Q should have attracted the closest wh-element who, instead of attracting the more distant what. (5) a. *[I wonder [CP whati [C Q [IP who [VP bought ti]]]]] b. [CP Q [IP who [VP bought what]]] The Minimal Link Condition is in consonance with the general economy considerations underlying minimalism, in that it reduces the search space for computations, thereby reducing (“operative”) computational complexity. However, it has nothing to say about CED effects such as the ones illustrated in (1)–(3). In (1a), for instance, there is no wh-element other than which politician that Q could have attracted. In this chapter we argue, ﬁrst, that CED effects arise when a syntactic object that is required at a given derivational step has become inaccessible to the computational system at a previous derivational stage; and second, that the contrasts between (1) and (2), on the one hand, and between (2) and (3), on the other, are due to their different derivational histories. These results arise as by-products of two independent lines of research on the role of Kayne’s (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA) in the minimalist framework: the Multiple Spell-Out system of Chapter 3, which derives the induction step of the LCA by eliminating the unmotivated stipulation that Spell-out must apply only once, and Nunes’s (1995, 1998) version of the copy theory of movement, which permits instances of sideward movement (i.e. movement between two unconnected syntactic objects) if the LCA is satisﬁed. The chapter is organized as follows. In Section 2, we show how the standard CED effects illustrated in (1) can be accounted for within the Multiple SpellOut theory proposed in the previous chapter. In Section 3, we show that sideward movement allows constrained instances of movement from CED islands, resulting in parasitic gap constructions such as (2). In Section 4, we provide an account of the unacceptability of constructions such as (3) by reducing the computational complexity associated with sideward movement in terms of Chomsky’s (2000) cyclic access to subarrays. Finally, a brief conclusion is presented in Section 5. 67

DERIVATIONS

2 Basic CED effects Any account of the CED has to make a principled distinction between complements and noncomplements (see Cattell 1976 for early, very useful discussion). Kayne’s (1994) LCA has the desired effect: a given head can be directly linearized with respect to the lexical items within its complement, but not with respect to the lexical items within its subject or adjunct. The reason is trivial. Consider the phrase-marker in (6), for instance (irrelevant details omitted). (6)

VP DP the man

V' PP

V'

remained

AP after that fact

proud of her

It is a simple fact about the Merge operation that only the terminal elements in boldface in (6) can be assembled without ever abandoning a single derivational workspace; by contrast, the terminal elements under DP and PP must ﬁrst be assembled in a separate derivational space before being connected to the rest. One can capitalize on this derivational fact in various ways. Let us recast Kayne’s (1994) LCA in terms of Chomsky’s (1995b) bare phrase-structure and simplify its deﬁnition by eliminating the recursive step, as formulated in (7).1 (7) Linear Correspondence Axiom A lexical item precedes a lexical item iff asymmetrically c-commands . Clearly, all the terminals in boldface in (6) stand in valid precedence relations, according to (7). The question is how they can establish precedence relations with the terminals within DP and PP, if the LCA is as simple as (7). Chapter 3 suggests an answer, by taking the number of applications of the rule of Spell-out to be determined by standard economy considerations, and not by the unmotivated stipulation that Spell-out must apply only once. Here we will focus our attention to cases where multiple applications of Spell-out are triggered by linearization considerations (see Chapter 5 for other cases and further discussion). The reasoning goes as follows. Let us refer to the operation that maps a phrase structure into a linear order of terminals in accordance to the LCA in (7) as Linearize.2 Under the standard assumption that phrasal syntactic objects are not legitimate objects at the PF level, Linearize can be viewed as an operation imposed on the phonological component by legibility requirements of the Articulatory – Perceptual interface, as essentially argued by Higginbotham (1983b). If this is so and if the LCA is as simple as (7), the 68

CYCLICITY AND EXTRACTION DOMAINS

computational system should not ship complex structures such as (6) to the phonological component by means of the Spell-out operation, because Linearize would not be able to determine precedence relations among all the lexical items. Assuming that failure to yield a total order among lexical items leads to an ill-formed derivation, the system is forced to employ multiple applications of Spell-out, targeting chunks of structure that Linearize can operate with. Under this view, the elements in subject and adjunct position in (6) can be linearized with regards to the rest of the structure in accordance with (7) in the following way: (i) the DP and the PP are spelled out separately and in the phonological component, their lexical items are linearized internal to them; and (ii) the DP and the PP are later “plugged in” where they belong in the whole structure. We assume that the label of a given structure provides the “address” for the appropriate plugging in, in both the phonological and the interpretive components.3 That is, applied to the syntactic object K { , {, }}, with label and constituents and (see Chomsky 1995b: Chapter 4), Spellout ships {, } to the phonological and interpretive components, leaving K only with its label. Since the label encodes the relevant pieces of information that allow a category to undergo syntactic operations, K itself is still accessible to the computational system, despite the fact that its constituent parts are, in a sense, gone; thus, for instance, K can move and is visible to linearization when the whole structure is spelled out. Another way to put it is to say that once the constituent parts of K are gone, the computational system treats it as a lexical item. In order to facilitate keeping track of the computations in the following discussion, we use the notation K [ , ] to represent K after it has been spelled out. An interesting consequence of this proposal is that Multiple Spell-Out of separate derivational cascades derives Cattell’s (1976) original observation that only complements are transparent to movement. When Spell-out applies to the subject DP in (6), for instance, the computational system no longer has access to its constituents and, therefore, no element can be extracted out of it. Let us consider a concrete case, by examining the relevant details of the derivation of (8), after the stage where the structures K and L in (9) have been assembled by successive applications of Merge. (8) *Which politician did pictures of upset the voters? (9) a. K [vP upset the voters] b. L [pictures of which politician] If the LCA is as simple as in (7), the complex syntactic object resulting from the merger of K and L in (9) would not be linearizable, because the constituents of K would not enter into a c-command relation with the constituents of L. The computational system then applies Spell-out to L, allowing its constituents to be linearized in the phonological component, and merges the spelled-out structure L with K, as illustrated in (10).4 69

DERIVATIONS

(10)

vP L' [picturespictures, of, which, politician]

v' v

VP upset the voters

Further computations involve the merger of did and movement of L to [Spec, TP]. Assuming Chomsky’s (1995b: Chapter 3) copy theory of movement, this amounts to saying that the computational system copies L and merges it with the assembled structure, yielding the structure in (11) (the deletion of the lower copy in the phonological component is discussed in Section 3). (11) [TP [pictures pictures, of, which, politician] [T did [vP [pictures pictures, of, which, politician] [v upset the voters]]]] In the next steps, the interrogative complementizer Q merges with TP and did adjoins to it, yielding (12). (12) [CP didQ [TP [pictures pictures, of, which, politician] [T did [vP [pictures pictures, of, which, politician] [v upset the voters]]]]] In (12), there is no element that can check the strong wh-feature of Q. Crucially, the wh-element of either copy of L [pictures pictures, of, which, politician] became unavailable to the computational system after L was spelled out. The derivation therefore crashes. Under this view, there is no way for the computational system to yield the sentence in (8) if derivations unfold in a strictly cyclic fashion, as we are assuming. To put it in more general terms, extraction out of a subject is prohibited because, at the relevant derivational point, there is literally no syntactic object within the subject that could be copied. Similar considerations apply to the sentence in (13), which illustrates the impossibility of “extraction” out of an adjunct clause. (13) *Which paper did you read Don Quixote before ﬁling? Assume for concreteness that the temporal adjunct clause of (13) is adjoined to vP. Once K and L in (14) have been assembled, Spell-out must apply to L, before K and L merge; otherwise, the lexical items of K could not be linearized with respect to the lexical items of L. After L is spelled out as L, it merges with K, yielding (15). In the phonological component, Linearize applies to the lexical items of L and the resulting sequence will be later plugged in the appropriate place, after the whole structure is spelled out. The linear order between the lexical items of L and the lexical items of K will then be (indirectly) determined by whatever ﬁxes the order of adjuncts in the grammar.5 (14) a. K [vP you read Don Quixote] b. L [PP before PRO ﬁling which paper] 70

CYCLICITY AND EXTRACTION DOMAINS

(15)

vP [vP you read Don Quixote]

L' [beforebefore, PRO, filing, which, paper]

What is relevant for our current discussion is that after the (simpliﬁed) structure in (16) is formed, there is no wh-element available to check the strong whfeature of Q and the derivation crashes; in particular, which paper is no longer accessible to the computational system at the step where it should be copied to check the strong feature of Q. As before, the sentence in (13) is underivable through the cyclic derivation outlined in (14)–(16). (16) [CP didQ [TP you [vP [vP read Don Quixote] [before before, PRO, ﬁling, which, paper]]]] Finally, let us consider (17a). Structures like (17a) have recently been taken to show that cyclicity cannot be violated. If movement of who to [Spec, CP] were allowed to proceed prior to the movement of to the subject position, (17a) should pattern like (17b), where who is extracted from within the object, contrary to fact. If cyclicity is inviolable, so the argument goes, who in (17a) must have moved from within the subject, yielding a CED effect (see Chomsky 1995b: 328; Kitahara 1997: 33). (17) a. *whoi was [ a picture of ti]k taken tk by Bill b. whoi did Bill take [ a picture of ti] A closer examination of this reasoning, however, reveals that it only goes through in a system that takes traces to be grammatical primitives. If the trace of in (17a) is simply a copy of , as shown in (18), the copy of who inside the object should in principle be able to move to [Spec, CP], incorrectly yielding an acceptable result. Crucially, the copy of who within the subject does not c-command the copy within the object and no intervention effect should arise. (18) [CP Q [TP [ a picture of who] was taken [ a picture of who] by Bill]] Before we discuss how the system we have been exploring, which assumes the copy theory of movement, is able to account for the unacceptability of (17a), let us ﬁrst consider the derivation of (19), where no wh-movement is involved. (19) Some pictures of John were taken by Bill. In (20), the computational system makes a copy of some pictures of John, spells it out and merges the spelled-out copy with K, forming the object in (21). (20) a. K [TP were [VP taken [some pictures of John] by Bill]] b. L [some some, pictures, of, John] (21) [TP [some some, pictures, of, John] [T were [VP taken [some pictures of John] by Bill]]] 71

DERIVATIONS

Under reasonable assumptions regarding chain uniformity, the elements in subject and object positions in (21) cannot constitute a chain because they are simply different kinds of syntactic objects (a label and a phrasal syntactic object). Assume for the moment that lack of chain formation in (21) leads to a derivational crash (see next section for further discussion). Given the perfect acceptability of (19), an alternative route must be available. Recall that under the Multiple Spell-Out approach, the number of applications of Spell-out is determined by economy. Thus, complements in general do not need to be spelled out in separate derivational cascades because they can be linearized within the derivational cascade involving the subcategorizing verb – that is, a single application of Spell-out can linearize both the verb and its complement. In the case of (21), however, a licit chain can only arise if the NP in the object position has been independently spelled out, so that the two copies can constitute a chain. This leads us to conclude that convergence demands may force Spell-out to apply to complements, as well. That being so, the question then is whether the object is spelled out in (20a) before copying takes place or only after the structure in (21) has been assembled. Again, we may ﬁnd the answer in economy: if Spell-out applies to some pictures of John before it is copied, the copies will be already spelled out and no applications of Spell-out will be further required for the copies.6 The derivation of (19) therefore proceeds along the lines of (22): the NP is spelled out before being copied in (22a) and its copy merges with the whole structure, as shown in (22b); the two copies of the NP can then form a licit chain and the derivation converges. (22) a. [TP were [VP taken [some some, pictures, of, John] by Bill]] b. [TP [some some, pictures, of, John] [T were [VP taken [some some, pictures, of, John] by Bill]]] Returning to (17a), its derivation proceeds in a cyclic fashion along the same lines, yielding the (simpliﬁed) structure in (23). Once the stage in (23) is reached, no possible continuation results in a convergent derivation: the strong wh-feature of Q must be checked and neither copy of who is accessible to the computational system. The approach we have been exploring here is therefore able to account for the unacceptability of (17a), while still adhering to the view that traces are simply copies and not grammatical formatives. (23) [CP wasQ [TP [a a, picture, of, who] [VP taken [a a, picture, of, who] by Bill]]] To summarize, CED effects arise when a given syntactic object K that would be needed for computations at a derivational stage Dn has been spelled out at a derivational stage Di prior to Dn, thereby becoming inaccessible to the computational system after Di. Under this view, the CED is not a primitive condition on movement operations; it rather presents itself as a natural consequence in a derivational system that obeys strict cyclicity and takes general economy considerations to determine the number of applications of Spell-out.7 72

CYCLICITY AND EXTRACTION DOMAINS

The question that we now face is how to explain the complex behavior of parasitic gap constructions with respect to the CED, as seen in the introduction, if the deduction of the CED developed above is correct. This is the topic of the next sections. Notice, for instance, that we cannot simply assume that parasitic gap constructions bypass some condition X that regular extractions obey; in fact, we are suggesting that there is no particular condition X to prevent extraction and, therefore, no way to bypass it either. Before going into the analysis proper, we brieﬂy review Nunes’s (1995, 1998) analysis of parasitic gaps in terms of sideward movement, which provides us with the relevant ingredients to address the issue of CED effects in parasitic gap constructions.

3 Sideward movement and CED effects With the incorporation of the copy theory into the Minimalist Program, Move has been conceived of as a complex operation encompassing: (i) a suboperation of copying; (ii) a suboperation of merger; (iii) a procedure identifying copies as chains; and (iv) a suboperation deleting traces (lower copies) for PF purposes (see Chomsky 1995b: 250). Nunes (1995, 1998) develops an alternative version of the copy theory of movement with two main distinctive features. First, his theory takes deletion of traces in the phonological component to be prompted by linearization considerations. Take the structure in (24b), for instance, which is based on the (simpliﬁed) initial numeration N in (24a) and arises after John moves to the subject position. (24) a. N {arrested1, John1, was1} b. [Johni [was [arrested Johni]]] The two occurrences of John in (24b) are nondistinct copies (henceforth represented by superscripted indices) in the sense that both of them arise from the same item within N in (24a). If nondistinct copies are truly “the same” for purposes of linearization, (24b) cannot be mapped into a linear order.8 Given that the verb was, for instance, asymmetrically c-commands the lower copy of John and is asymmetrically c-commanded by the higher copy, the LCA should require that was precede and be preceded by John, violating the asymmetry condition on linear orders (if precedes , it must be the case that does not precede ). The attempted linearization of (24b) also violates the irreﬂexivity condition on linear orders (if precedes , it must be the case that 苷 ); since the upper copy of John asymmetrically c-commands the lower one, John would be required to precede itself. Simply put, deletion of traces in the phonological component is forced upon a given chain CH in order for the structure containing CH to be linearized.9 The second distinctive feature of Nunes’s (1995, 1998) version of the copy theory, which is crucial for the following discussion, is that Move is not taken to be a primitive operation of the computational system; it is rather analyzed as the mere reﬂex of the interaction among the independent operations described in (i)–(iv) above. In particular, this system allows constrained instances of 73

DERIVATIONS

sideward movement, where the computational system copies a given constituent of a syntactic object K and merges with a syntactic object L, which has been independently assembled and is unconnected to K, as illustrated in (25).10 (25) a. [K…i…]

Copy

i

Merge

[L…]

[Mi[L…]]

b. [K…i…]

Let us consider how a parasitic gap construction such as (26a) can be derived under a sideward movement analysis, assuming that its initial numeration is the one given in (26b) (irrelevant items were omitted). (26) a. Which paper did John ﬁle after reading? b. N {which1, paper1, did1, John1, PRO1, Q1, ﬁle1, after1, reading1, v2, C1} (27) shows the step after the numeration N in (26b) has been reduced to N and K has been assembled. Following Munn (1994) and Hornstein (2001), we assume that what Chomsky (1986a) took to be null operator movement in parasitic gap constructions is actually movement of a syntactic object built from the lexical items of the numeration. From the perspective we are exploring, that amounts to saying that the computational system spells out which paper in (27b), makes a copy of the spelled-out object (see Note 6), and merges it with K to check whatever feature is involved in successive cyclic A-movement, yielding L in (28a). The computational system then selects the preposition after and merges with L, forming the PP in (28b). (27) a. N {which0, paper0, did1, John1, PRO0, Q1, ﬁle1, after1, reading0, v1, C0} b. K [CP C PRO reading [which paper]] (28) a. L [CP [which which, paper]i C PRO reading [which which, paper]i] b. M [PP after [CP [whichwhich, paper]i C PRO reading [whichwhich, paper]i]] Consider now the stage after ﬁle is selected from the numeration, as shown in (29). Following Chomsky (2000), we assume that the selectional/thematic properties of ﬁle must be checked under Merge. However, possible continuations of the derivational step in (29) that merge ﬁle with the remaining elements of the reduced numeration N in (27a) do not lead to a convergent derivation; under standard assumptions, John should not be able to enter into a -relation with both ﬁle and the remaining light verb, or check both the accusative Case associated with the light verb and the nominative Case associated with did. Once lexical insertion leads to crashing, the system must resort to (sideward) 74

CYCLICITY AND EXTRACTION DOMAINS

movement, copying which paper from L and merging it with ﬁle, as shown in (30).11 The wh-copy in (30b) may then “mind its own business” within derivational workspace P, independently of the other copies inside M. This is the essence of the account of parasitic gaps in terms of sideward movement. (29) a. M [PP after [CP [whichwhich, paper]i C PRO reading [whichwhich, paper]i]] b. O ﬁle (30) a. M [PP after [CP [whichwhich, paper]i C PRO reading [whichwhich, paper]i]] b. P [VP ﬁle [which which, paper]i] It is important to note that sideward movement of [which which, paper] in (29)–(30) was possible because M had not been spelled out; hence, the computational system had access not only to M itself, but also to the constituents of M. The situation changes in subsequent derivational steps. As discussed in Section 2, a complex adjunct must be spelled out before it merges with a given syntactic object; hence, the computational system spells out M as M in (31a) and merges M with the matrix vP, as represented in (31b). (31) a. M [afterafter, [whichwhich, paper]i, C, PRO, reading, [whichwhich, paper]i ] b. vP vP

M'

[VP John file [whichwhich, paper]i]

[afterafter, [which,which, paper.]i, C, PRO, reading, [whichwhich, paper]i]

Further computations involve lexical insertion of the remaining items of the numeration and movement of John and did, resulting in the (simpliﬁed) structure represented in (32). (32) [CP didQ [IP John [vP [vP ﬁle [which which, paper]i] [after after, [which which, paper]i, C, PRO, reading, [which which, paper]i ]]]] The copies of [which which, paper] inside the adjunct clause in (32) are not available for copying, because the whole adjunct clause has already been spelled out; however, the copy in the object of ﬁle is still available to the computational system and, therefore, it can move to check the strong wh-feature of Q, yielding the (simpliﬁed) structure in (33), where the copies are numbered for ease of reference.

75

DERIVATIONS

(33)

CP [whichwhich, paper]1

C'

didQ

TP

John

T' T

vP

vP

M'

[VP file [whichwhich, paper]2]

[afterafter, [whichwhich, paper]3, C, PRO, reading, [whichwhich, paper]4]

Let us now focus on the computations related to the deletion of wh-traces of (33) in the phonological component. As discussed before, the presence of multiple nondistinct copies prevents linearization. In the phonological component, the trace of the wh-chain within M is then deleted before Linearize applies to M to yield M, as shown in (34). (34) M [afterafter, [whichwhich, paper]3, C, PRO, reading, [whichwhich, paper]4 ] After Spell-out applies to the whole structure in (33) and the previously spelledout material is appropriately plugged in, two wh-chains should be further identiﬁed for trace deletion to take place: the “regular” chain CH1 (copy1, copy2) and the “parasitic” chain CH2 (copy1, copy3).12 Identiﬁcation of CH1 is trivial because copy1 clearly c-commands copy2; hence, deletion of copy2 is without problems. Identiﬁcation of CH2 is less obvious, because M is no longer a phrasestructure after being linearized. However, if c-command is obtained by the composition of the elementary relations of sisterhood and containment, as proposed by Chomsky (2000: 31) (see also Epstein 1999), copy1 does c-command copy3 in (33), because the sister of copy1, namely C, ends up containing copy3 after the linearized material of M is properly plugged in.13 The phonological component then deletes copy3, yielding (35). Finally, Linearize applies to (35) and the PF output associated with (26a) is derived.14 (35) [CP [which which, paper]1 didQ [IP John [vP [vP ﬁle [which which, paper]2] [after after, [whichwhich, paper]3, C, PRO, reading, [whichwhich, paper]4 ]]]] Assuming that derivations proceed in such a strictly cyclic fashion, the contrast between unacceptable constructions involving “extraction” from within an adjunct island such as (13) and parasitic gap constructions such as (26a), there76

CYCLICITY AND EXTRACTION DOMAINS

fore, follows from their different derivational histories. In the unacceptable case, the clausal adjunct has already been spelled out and its constituents are no longer available for copying at the derivational step where Last Resort would license the required copying (see Section 2). In the acceptable parasitic gap constructions, on the other hand, a legitimate instance of copying takes place before the clausal adjunct is spelled out (see (29)–(30)); that is, sideward movement, if appropriately constrained by Last Resort, provides a kind of escape hatch for movement from within adjuncts.15 Similar considerations apply to parasitic gaps inside subjects. Let us consider the derivation of (36a), for instance, which starts with the numeration N in (36b). (36) a. Which politician did pictures of upset? b. N {which1, politician1, did1, pictures1, of1, upset1, Q1, v1} Suppose that after the derivational step in (37) is reached, K and L merge. No convergent result would then arise, because there would be no element in the numeration N in (37a) to receive the external -role assigned by the light verb to be later introduced; in addition, if either K or the wh-phrase within K moved to [Spec, vP], they would be involved in more than one -relation within the same derivational workspace, leading to a violation of the -Criterion.16 (37) a. N {which0, politician0, did1, pictures0, of0, upset0, Q1, v1} b. K [pictures of [which politician]] c. L upset The computational system may instead spell out the wh-phrase, make a copy of the spelled-out object, and merge it with upset (an instance of sideward movement), as shown in (38). Each copy of which politician in (38) will now participate in a -relation, but in a different derivational workspace, as in (30). (38) a. K [pictures of [which which, politician]i] b. M [upset [which which, politician]i] In the next steps, the light verb is selected from the numeration N in (37a) and merges with M in (38b), and the resulting structure merges with K after K is spelled out, yielding the (simpliﬁed) structure in (39). Further computations then involve merger and movement of did, and movement of the spelled-out subject to [Spec, TP], forming the (simpliﬁed) structure in (40). (39) [vP [pictures pictures, of, [which which, politician]i ] [v upset [which which, politician]i]] (40) [CP didQ [TP [pictures pictures, of, [which which, politician]i ]k T [vP [pictures pictures, of, [which which, politician]i ]k [v upset [which which, politician]i]]]] Among the three copies of which politician represented in (40), only the one in the object position of upset is available for copying; the other two became inaccessible after K in (37) was spelled out. The computational system then makes a 77

DERIVATIONS

copy of the accessible wh-element and merges it with the structure in (40), allowing Q to have its strong feature checked and ﬁnally yielding the structure in (41). (41)

CP [whichwhich, politician]1

T'

didQ

TP

[picturespictures, of, [whichwhich, politician]2]k

T' T

vP

[picturespictures, of, [whichwhich, politician]3]k

v' upset

[whichwhich, politician]4

In the phonological component, deletion of the trace of the chain involving [Spec, TP] and [Spec, vP] in (41) ends up deleting copy3, because copy3 sits within [Spec, vP]. As for the other wh-copies, since copy1 c-commands both copy2 and copy4 after the linearized material is plugged in (see discussion above), the chains CH1 (copy1, copy2) and CH2 (copy1, copy4) can be identiﬁed and their traces are deleted, yielding (42) below.17 (42) is then linearized and surfaces as (36a). Again, an apparent extraction from within a subject was only possible because Last Resort licensed sideward movement before the computational system spelled out the would-be subject. (42) [CP [which which, politician]1 didQ [TP [pictures pictures, of, [which which, politician]2 ]k T [vP [pictures pictures, of, [which which, politician]3 ]k [v upset [which which, politician]4]]]] Although sideward movement may permit circumvention of CED islands in the cases discussed above, its output is constrained by linearization, like any standard instance of upward movement. That is, the same linearization considerations that trigger deletion of traces are responsible for ruling out unwanted instances of sideward movement (see Nunes 1995, 1998 for discussion). Take the derivation sketched in (43)–(45), for instance, where every paper is spelled out and undergoes sideward movement from K to L. As is, the ﬁnal structure in (44) cannot be linearized: given that the two instances of every paper are nondistinct, the preposition after, for instance, is subject to the contradictory requirement that it should precede and be preceded by every paper. In the cases discussed thus far, this kind of problem is remedied by trace deletion (deletion of lower chain links). However, trace deletion is inapplicable in (44); given that the two copies do not enter into a c-command relation, they cannot be identiﬁed 78

CYCLICITY AND EXTRACTION DOMAINS

as a chain.18 Thus, there is no convergent result arising from (44) and the parasitic gap construction in (45) is correctly ruled out. (43) a. K [PP after reading [every every, paper]i] b. L [VP ﬁled [every every, paper]i] (44) [TP John [vP [vP ﬁled [every every, paper]i] [after after, reading, [every every, paper]i]]] (45) *John ﬁled every paper without reading. To sum up, the analysis explored above is very much in consonance with minimalist guidelines in that it attempts to deduce construction speciﬁc properties from general bare output conditions (more precisely, PF linearization); it limits the search space for deletion of copies (it can only happen within a c-command path), and it does not resort to the non-interface level of S-Structure to rule out (45), like standard GB analysis do (see Chomsky 1982, for instance).19 With respect to the main topic of this chapter, the lack of CED effects in acceptable parasitic gaps is argued to follow from the fact that Last Resort may license sideward movement from within a complex category XP, before XP is spelled out and its constituents become inaccessible to the Copy operation. In the next section, we will see that when parasitic gap constructions do exhibit CED effects, this is due to general properties of the system’s design, which strives to reduce computational complexity.

4 Sideward movement and cyclic access to the numeration Let us ﬁnally examine the unacceptable parasitic gaps constructions in (46), which illustrate the fact that parasitic gaps are not completely immune to CED effects. (46) a. *Which book did you ﬁnally read after leaving the bookstore without ﬁnding? b. *Which politician did you criticize before pictures of upset the voters? Under one derivational route, the explanation for the unacceptability of the sentences in (46) is straightforward. The PP adjunct headed by without in (46a), for instance, must be spelled out before merging with the vP related to leaving, as represented in the simpliﬁed structure in (47a) below; hence, the constituents of this PP adjunct are not accessible to the computational system and sideward movement of which book from K to L is impossible. Likewise, sideward movement of which politician from X in (48a) to Y in (48b) cannot take place because the subject in (48a) has been spelled out and its constituent terms are inaccessible for copying; hence, the unacceptability of (46b). (47) a. K [leaving the bookstore [without without, PRO, ﬁnding, which, book]] b. L read 79

DERIVATIONS

(48) a. X [IP [pictures pictures, of, which politician] upset the voters] b. Y criticize This account of the unacceptability of the parasitic gap constructions in (46) has crucially assumed that the computation proceeds from a “subordinated” to a “subordinating” derivational workspace; in all the cases discussed so far, sideward movement has proceeded from within an adjunct or subject to the object position of a subordinating verb. This assumption is by no means innocent. In principle, the computational system could also allow sideward movement to proceed from a “subordinating” to a “subordinated” derivational workspace, while still adhering to cyclicity. Suppose, for instance, that we assemble the matrix VP of (46a), before building the VP headed by ﬁnding, as represented in (49). (49) a. K [read [which book]] b. L ﬁnding Given the stage in (49), which book could undergo sideward movement from K to L, and M in (50b) would be formed (irrelevant details omitted). Further computations after M was spelled out and merged with K would then yield the (simpliﬁed) structure in (51). (50) a. K [read [which which, book]i] b. M [after PRO leaving the bookstore [without without, PRO, ﬁnding, [which which, book]i ]] (51)

CP didQ

TP

you

T' T

vP

vP

PP

read [whichwhich, book]i

[afterafter, PRO, leaving, the, bookstore, [withoutwithout, PRO, finding, [whichwhich, book]i]]

The relevant aspect of (51) is that, although the wh-copy inside PP is not accessible to the computational system, the wh-copy in the object position of read is. It could then move to check the strong feature of Q and deletion of the lower whcopies would yield the (simpliﬁed) structure in (52), which should surface as (46a). 80

CYCLICITY AND EXTRACTION DOMAINS

(52) [CP [whichwhich, book]i didQ [TP you [vP [vP read [which which, book]i] [after after, PRO, leaving, the, bookstore, [without without, PRO, ﬁnding, [which which, book]i ] ]]]] Thus, if sideward movement were allowed to proceed along the lines of (49)–(50), where a given constituent moves from a derivational workspace W1 to a derivational workspace W2 that will end up being embedded under W1, there should never be any CED effect in parasitic gap constructions and we would incorrectly predict that (46a) should be acceptable. Similar considerations apply to the alternative derivation of (46b) sketched in (53)–(56) below. In (53)–(54), which politician moves from the object position of criticize to the complement position of the preposition; further (cyclic) computations then yield the (simpliﬁed) structure in (55), in which the wh-copy in the matrix object position is still accessible to the computational system, thus being able to move and check the strong feature of Q. After this movement takes place, the whole structure is spelled out and the lower copies of which politician are deleted in the phonological component, as shown in (56). The derivation outlined in (53)–(56) therefore incorrectly rules in the unacceptable parasitic gap in (46b). (53) a. X [criticize [which politician]] b. Y of (54) a. X [criticize [which which politician]i] b. Z [of [which which politician]i] (55)

CP didQ

TP

you

T' T

vP

vP

PP

criticize [whichwhich politician]i

[beforebefore, [picturespictures, of, [whichwhich, politician]i], upset, the, voters]

(56) [CP [which which, politician ]i didQ [TP you [vP [vP criticize [which which, politician]i] [before before, [pictures pictures, of, [which which, politician]i ], upset, the, voters ]]]] The generalization that arises from the discussion above is that sideward movement from a derivational workspace W1 to a derivational workspace W2 yields licit results just in case W1 will be embedded in W2 at some derivational step. In 81

DERIVATIONS

the undesirable derivations sketched in (49)–(52) and (53)–(56), sideward movement has proceeded from the “matrix derivational work space” to a subordinated one. Obviously, the question is how this generalization can be derived from independent considerations. Abstractly, the problem we face here is no different from the one posed by economy computations involving expletive insertion in pairs such as (57), originally noted by Alec Marantz and Juan Romero. The two sentences in (57) share the same initial numeration; thus, if the computational system had access to the whole numeration, economy should favor insertion of there at the point where the structure in (58) has been assembled, incorrectly ruling out the derivation of the acceptable sentence in (57b). (57) a. The fact is that there is someone in the room. b. There is the fact that someone is in the room. (58) [is someone in the room] Addressing this and other similar issues, Chomsky (2000) proposes that rather than working with the numeration as a whole, the computational system actually works with subarrays of the numeration, each containing one instance of either a complementizer or a light verb. Furthermore, according to Chomsky’s 2000 proposal, when a new subarray SAi is selected, the vP or CP previously assembled based on subarray SAk becomes frozen in the sense that no more checking or thematic relations may take place within it. Returning to the possibilities in (57), at the point where (58) is assembled, competition between insertion of there and movement of someone arises only if the active subarray feeding the derivation has an occurrence of the expletive; if it does not, as is the case of (57b), movement is the only option and the expletive is inserted later on, when another subarray is selected. This strongly derivational approach has the relevant components for a principled account of why sideward movement must proceed from embedded to embedding contexts. If the computational system had access to the whole numeration, the derivation of the parasitic gap constructions in (46), for instance, could proceed either along the lines of (47) and (48) or along the lines of (49)–(52) and (53)–(56), yielding an undesirable result because the latter incorrectly predict that the sentences in (46) are acceptable. However, if the computational system works with one subarray at a time and if syntactic objects already assembled become frozen when a new subarray is selected, the unwanted derivations outlined in (49)–(52) and (53)–(56) are correctly excluded. Let us consider the details. Assuming that numerations should be structured in terms of subarrays, the derivation in (49)–(52) should start with the numeration in (59) below, which contains the subarrays A–F, each determined by a light verb or a complementizer. (59) N {{A Q1, did1}, {B you1, ﬁnally1, v1, read1, which1, book1, after1}, {C C1, T1}, {D PRO1, v1, leaving1, the1, bookstore1, without1}, 82

CYCLICITY AND EXTRACTION DOMAINS

{E C1, T1}, {F PRO1, v1, ﬁnding1}} The derivational step in (49), repeated here in (60), which would permit the undesirable instances of sideward movement, is actually illicit because it accesses a new subarray before it has used up the lexical items of the active subarray. More speciﬁcally, the derivational stage in (60) improperly accesses subarrays B and F of (59).20 (60) a. K [read [which book]] b. L ﬁnding Similarly, the step in (53), repeated here in (62), illicitly activates subarrays B and D of (61), which is the structured numeration that underlies the derivation in (53)–(56). (61) N {{A Q1, did1}, {B you1, v1, criticize1, which1, politician1, before1} {C C1, T1}, {D pictures1, of1, v1, upset1, the1, voters1}} (62) a. X [criticize [which politician]] b. Y of The problem with the derivations outlined in (49)–(52) and (53)–(56), therefore, are not the instances of sideward movement themselves, but rather the derivational steps that should allow them. By contrast, lexical access in the derivational routes sketched in (47) and (48), repeated below in (64) and (66), may proceed in a cyclic fashion from the structured numerations in (63) and (65), respectively, without improperly activating more than one subarray at a time. However, as discussed above, sideward movement of which book in (64) or which politician in (66) is impossible because these elements have already been spelled out and are not accessible to the computational system. (63) N {{A Q1, did1}, {B you1, ﬁnally1, v1, read1, after1}, {C C1, T1}, {D PRO1, v1, leaving1, the1, bookstore1, without1}, {E C1, T1}, {F PRO1, v1, ﬁnding1, which1, book1}} (64) a. K [CP C [TP PRO T [vP [vP leavingv the bookstore] [without without, C, PRO, T, ﬁndingv, which, book]]]] b. L read (65) N {{A Q1, did1}, {B you1, v1, criticize1, before1} {C C1, T1}, {D pictures1, of1, which1, politician1, v1, upset1, the1, voters1}} 83

DERIVATIONS

(66) a. X [CP C [TP [pictures pictures, of, which, politician] T [vP [pictures pictures, of, which, politician [v upsetv the voters]]]]] b. Y criticize The analysis of CED effects in parasitic gap constructions developed here can therefore be understood as providing evidence for a strongly derivational system, where even lexical access proceeds in a cyclic fashion.21

5 Conclusion This chapter has attempted to provide a minimalist analysis of classical extraction domains, in terms of derivational dynamics in a cyclic system. The main lines of research which provide a solution to the relevant kind of islands are (i) a computational system with multiple applications of Spell-out; and (ii) a decomposition of the Move operation into its constituent parts, taking seriously the idea that separate copies are real objects and can be manipulated in separate derivational workspaces (sideward movement). Extraction domains are opaque because, after Spell-out, the constituent terms of a given chunk of structure, while interpretable, are no longer accessible to the rest of the derivation. At the same time, this opacity can be bypassed if an extra copy of the moving term manages to arise before the structure containing it is spelled out, something that the system in principle allows. However, this possibility is severely limited by other computational considerations. For example, Last Resort imposes that the extra copy be legitimated, which separates instances where this copy is made with no purpose other than escaping an island (a CED effect) from instances where the copy is made in order to satisfy a -relation (a parasitic gap construction). In the second case, the crucial copy can be legitimated prior to the Spell-out of the would-be island, thus resulting in a grammatical structure. Moreover, we have shown how sideward movement can only proceed, as it were, forward within the derivational history. That result is straightforwardly achieved in a radically derivational system, where the very access to the initial lexical array is done in a strictly cyclic fashion. Although we ﬁnd these results rather interesting, we do not want to ﬁnish without pointing out some of our concerns, as topics for further research. Our whole analysis relies on the assumptions that copies are real, and as such can be manipulated as bona ﬁde terms within the derivation. If so, it is perplexing that, for the purposes of linearization different copies count as one, which drives a good part of the logic of the chapter. Of course, we can make this be the case by stipulating a deﬁnition of identity, as we have (token in the numeration as opposed to occurrence in the derivation); but we do not know why that deﬁnition holds. Second, it is fundamental for the account of island effects that spelled-out chunks be inaccessible to computation. However, chain identiﬁcation can proceed across spelled-out portions, also in a rather surprising way. Once again, we can make things work by making c-command insensitive to anything other than the notion of containment; but we do not know why that 84

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should be, or why c-command should hold, to start with, of chains. Finally, it should be noted that cyclic access to the numeration is key in order to keep the proper order of operations; we have no idea why the relevant derivational cycles should be the ones we have assumed, following Chomsky (2000). All we can say with regards to all these questions is that we have suspended our disbelief, just to see how far the system can proceed within assumptions that are familiar.

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5 MINIMAL RESTRICTIONS ON BASQUE MOVEMENTS †

1 Introduction The Minimalist Program has no general account of islands. In part, this is because the system is designed in such a streamlined fashion B and with the assumption that computational mechanisms exist to meet the requirements of external interfaces – that little room is left for the apparently ad hoc considerations involved in formulating island conditions. In other words, nobody ﬁnds it elegant to speak of some category or another creating a barrier for movement, let alone removing such a barrier when necessary. In recent years, several attempts have been made to address at least some island restrictions within the Minimalist Program, with various degrees of success. In this chapter, I use some of the results discussed in Chapter 3, whereby it is argued that island effects arise as a consequence of a dynamic derivational system in which Spell-out – just as any other rule in the system – applies as many times as is necessary for a derivation to converge. In short, a structure to which Spell-out has applied becomes opaque for syntactic computation, thus turning into an island. Within these premises, this chapter studies a problematic paradigm from Basque syntactic studies, restrictions on question formation. The phenomenon has gained much attention throughout the last century because it deals with an ordering limitation in a language that looks otherwise rather free with respect to the position of verbal dependents; curiously, a question word must be leftadjacent to the verb. In present terms, an analysis is possible which has some rather important consequences for minimalism.

2 Wh-movement in Basque 2.1 Basic Basque syntax1 Basque is an underlyingly SOV, generally head-last language. It exhibits overt case morphology, the main cases being ergative ((e)k), absolutive (∅) dative ((r)i), and genitive (ko/ren): (1) Jonek Mireni Getxoko ogia bidali dio. J.-E M.-D G.-G bread-the/a-A sent 3-have-3-3 “Jon has sent Miren bread from Getxo.” 86

MINIMAL RESTRICTIONS ON BASQUE MOVEMENTS

Nominal dependents get genitive (G) case; indirect objects, dative (D) case; base subjects, ergative (E) case; and base objects (and derived subjects of unaccusatives), absolutive (A) case, in a typical ergative Case system. Regardless of aspectual demands, the majority of Basque verbs are followed by an auxiliary which encodes subject, object and indirect object agreement (shown as numbers for person in glosses). Their sequential order is generally A(bsolutive).AUXILIARY.D(ative).E(rgative), and agreement association to arguments is standard: absolutive for monadic predicates, absolutive plus ergative for diadic ones, and an extra dative for triadic ones (as in (1)) as well as causative constructions (as in (3) below). Auxiliary selection is standard, too: (2) a. Jon etorri da. J.-A arrived is-3 “Jon has arrived.” b. Jonek Miren maite du. J.-E M.-A love 3-have-3 “John has loved Mary.” c. Aizkolariak lan egin du. lumberjack-the/a-E work make 3-have-3 “The lumberjack has worked.” Unaccusatives select a form of izan “be”; transitives, a form of ukan “have”; intransitives (unergatives) select a form of ukan as well, exhibiting agreement with two arguments (the absolutive one being a default, third person singular).2 Reasonably, as a result of this rich agreement system, Basque allows prodrop in all three major argument positions:3 (3) a. Jaun kuntiak zezen bati Bereterretxe harrapaerazi zion. Mr. count-the-E bull one-D B.-A hit-make 3-have-3-3 “The count has made a bull hit Bereterretxe.” b. pro pro pro harrapaerazi zion. “He has made it hit him.” To a large extent, pro-drop may also be a major source of the apparent “free word order” of Basque. Such a view would be very consistent with the fact that, unlike verbs, nouns (which lack the pro-drop system) are in fact quite rigid in the linear ordering of their dependents: (4) a. Hargaineko sorgin zaharrak H.-G witch old-pl. “The old witches from Hargain” b. * zaharrak sorgin Hargaineko c. * Hargaineko zaharrak sorgin d. * sorgin zaharrak Hargaineko e. * sorgin Hargaineko zaharrak f. * zaharrak Hargaineko sorgin 87

DERIVATIONS

In contrast, major sentential constituents can appear in just about any order (with information-theoretic consequences). Witness the alternatives to (2b): (5) a. b. c. d. e.

Miren maite du Jonek. Maite du Jonek Miren. Miren Jonek maite du. Maite du Miren Jonek. Jonek maite du Miren.

It is then plausible that all the examples above involve right- and left dislocations of phrases which “double” a pro element (all of this is meant pretheoretically at this point). I will assume the representations in (6) in order to capture the variations in (5): (6) a. b. c. d. e.

[pro Miren maite du] Jonek. [[pro pro maite du] Jonek] Miren. Miren [Jonek pro maite du]. [[pro pro maite du] Miren] Jonek. [Jonek pro maite du] Miren.

Despite the ordering possibilities in (5), when wh-movement has occurred, the wh-phrase must be left-adjacent to the main verb. Thus, (7a/b) are possible, but (7c/d) are not:4 (7) a. Zer bidali dio (Jonek) (Mireni)? what-A sent 3-have-3-3 J.-E M.-A “What has Jon sent Miren?” b. (Jonek) (Mireni) zer bidali dio? c. * Zer Mireni bidali dio (Jonek)? d. * (Mireni) Zer Jonek bidali dio? 2.2 A plausible analysis and some problems The fact in (7) has received a considerable amount of attention since it was ﬁrst systematically discussed in Altube (1929). Within current assumptions, the standard account is that (7) exhibits a Verb second (V2) effect (Ortiz de Urbina 1989). An element like zer “what” in (7a) occupies the Spec of CP, and a verb like maite occupies the head of C, arguably guaranteeing the observed adjacency. From this perspective, (7b/c) would be the equivalent of the impossible English sentence *what to Mary has John sent? It is not my intention to question the technical details of the V2 analysis, but rather to offer an alternative within minimalism. For the sake of completeness, I should mention two difﬁculties the V2 approach must deal with, and which make the relevant analysis somewhat unnatural. The ﬁrst problem is that Basque complementizers appear clause-ﬁnally:5 (8) Mirenek [[Jon etorri de]] la esan du M.-E Jon-A arrived is-3-that said 3-have-3 “Miren has said that Jon has arrived.” 88

MINIMAL RESTRICTIONS ON BASQUE MOVEMENTS

No adjacency between the (rightmost) head of C and its (leftmost) speciﬁer can be guaranteed under these circumstances. Ortiz de Urbina is thus forced to assume that, contrary to appearances, Basque complementizers are ﬁrst and the observed post-verbal element is like a clitic. As evidence for his proposal, he claims that some Basque complementizers, e.g. nola are clause initial:6 (9) Mirenek [nola [Jon etorri de] n] esan du M.-E how J.-E arrived 3-is-if say 3-have-3 “Miren has said how Jon has arrived.” Perhaps a more plausible analysis for (9) is to treat nola as a (pseudofactive) element that occupies the Spec of CP, while the C head -n (underlined in (9)) occupies the appropriate rightmost site. Apart from preserving the generality of head positions in the language, this analysis would allow us to account for the contrasts in (10) involving long-distance wh-movement:7 (10) a. Nor esan du etorri dela Mirenek? who-A said 3-have-3 arrived 3-is-that M.-E Who has Miren said has arrived? b. * Nor esan du nola etorri den Mirenek? who-E said 3-have-3 how arrived 3-is-if M.-E In spite of observing the required adjacency between the moved wh-phrase and the verb, (10b) is out, unlike (10a). The facts could be nicely accounted for if the “escape hatch” of the lower CP, i.e. Spec of CP, is open in (10a) but is ﬁlled by nola in (10b).8 While it is true that Ortiz de Urbina could make the same claim within his V2 analysis (nola, in fact, occupying the Spec of CP), my point is that nola constitutes no independent evidence to conclude that Basque complementizer heads are clause initial. A second difﬁculty for the V2 analysis comes from the fact that, unlike standard V2, the Basque phenomenon under discussion is not restricted to the root, in two different senses: (11) a. Ez dakit zer (*Jonek) bidali dion. not know-1 what-A J.-E sent 3-have-3-3-if “I don’t know what Jon has sent.” b. Nork esan du ardoa bidali diola? who-E said 3-have-3 wine-(*the)-A sent 3-have-3-3-that “Who has he/she said has sent (*the) wine?” (11a) shows the effect in the complement of a question verb, whose associated wh-element (zer “what”) must be adjacent to the embedded verb (bidali “sent”). (11b) demonstrates that even bridge verbs – whose associated C structure is only used as an “escape hatch” – induce the relevant adjacency effect, in the following way. Even though a deﬁnite reading of ardoa “the wine” is possible in (11b), an indeﬁnite reading is not. This deﬁniteness effect can be accounted for if we assume that the embedded object is left-dislocated to the intermediate periphery (between the verb of saying and the embedded clause) 89

DERIVATIONS

when this object is deﬁnite, but such dislocation is not possible when the object receives an indeﬁnite interpretation. If so, the indeﬁnite object in (11b) occupies its normal preV position, and the ungrammaticality of the example (with a deﬁnite object) falls into the pattern seen before: ardoa breaks the adjacency between the embedded verb and the moving question word. These are not standard V2 effects. In fact, the V2 literature uses contexts like (11a) to test for the absence of V2 behavior (in languages where the phenomenon shows up in embedded clauses, though not with question verbs). As for (11b), the cyclic effect seen there is nothing like normal V2, which typically only affects the ultimate landing site of the wh-phrase. Ortiz de Urbina is well aware of all these issues, and thus compares the phenomena in (11) to the Spanish facts discussed by Torrego (1984): (12) No sé que (*Juan) envió. not know.1 what J. sent.3/past “I don’t know what Juan sent.” The comparison is well taken, but it is less clear that either set of facts (the Basque or the Spanish ones) can be analyzed as traditional V2. More importantly, it falls short of an explanation, insightful though the correlation clearly is. Laka (1990) argues convincingly that Basque does have standard V2 effects involving auxiliary movement in negative or emphatic contexts:9 (13) a. Miren ez du Jonek maite! M.-A not 3-have-3 J.-E love “Miren (is who) Jon hasn’t loved!” b. Arantza (ba) du Jonek maite! A.-A indeed 3-have-3 J.-E love “Arantza (is who) Jon indeed has loved!” c. Nor ez du Jonek maite? who-A not 3-have-3 J.-E love “Who (is who) Jon hasn’t loved?” Laka shows that this negative, emphatic construction exhibits the archetypical V2 pattern. The verb is displaced only in the matrix (contra what we saw in (11)), and only the auxiliary element appears in second position (contra what we have seen in all examples above, where the main verb and the auxiliary, in that order, appear adjacent to the wh-word). I include this comment on Laka’s observation to clarify that I am not claiming absence of V2 effects for Basque. Rather, standard V2 is not clearly at issue for the cases in which a wh-element must be adjacent to the verb (nor, for that matter, is V2 obviously at issue in the Spanish counterparts). In what follows I present an analysis of the Basque facts which extends to the sort of Spanish facts reported in (12), in effect denying that the relevant phenomenon is a V2 effect.

90

MINIMAL RESTRICTIONS ON BASQUE MOVEMENTS

3 An alternative analysis 3.1 Toward a different proposal The general view in this chapter was ﬁrst outlined in Laka and Uriagereka (1987; hereafter, L&U), within Chomsky’s (1986a) Barriers framework. I will recast the analysis in minimalist terms, but for presentational purposes I sketch it in the pre-minimalist model assumed in L&U. The major intuition of the analysis is that the observed adjacency between the moved wh-phrase (in the Spec of CP) and the main verb is a PF phenomenon. In other words, even though the elements in question are string-wise adjacent, they are not necessarily structurally adjacent. The main factor that conspires to yield this surface phenomenon is the fact that Basque is a pro-drop language. Hence, for sentences like ez dakit zer bidali dion “I don’t know what he sent to him/her,” it may well be that one or more null categories intervene between the wh-phrase zer and the verb bidali, roughly as follows: (14) [Ez dakit [zer [… pro … bidali dion]]] not know-1 what-A sent 3-have-3-3-if (14) is pronounced with PF adjacency between zer and bidali, but in fact several elements occur between these two items. If this view of the (superﬁcial) adjacency is correct, then the adjacency is not really what needs to be explained. That is to say, in a language in which every argument of the verb can be realized by pro, PF adjacency between the whelement and the verb is not surprising. Rather, the problem is the alternative to (14) in (15), where the relevant pros are replaced with overt constituents. Assuming, for now at least, that the only difference between a normal argument and pro is their pronunciation (the structures being otherwise identical), why is (15) not as good as (14)? (15) *[Ez dakit [zer [Jonek/Mireni … bidali dion]]] not know-1 what-A J.-E M.-D sent 3-have-3-3-if L&U propose a characterization of the notion barrier – based on Fukui and Speas (1987) – the effect of which is to make an XP with an overt speciﬁer a barrier, while leaving XPs whose speciﬁer is unexpressed transparent to movement.10 I take this intuition as a guiding analysis, but rather than restating the facts as in L&U, I will attempt to provide an explanation for why the morphological “heaviness” of speciﬁers should trigger barrierhood. Before moving to the analysis, however, there is an extension of the data which argues for the adequacy of stating the basic generalization in terms of barriers. 3.2 Extending the data How can we distinguish the V2 analysis from a barriers approach? One possibility is in terms of hypothetical examples in which the PF adjacency is broken. The V2 analysis predicts that such examples should not exist in a language in 91

DERIVATIONS

which the C Spec and head are both expanded to the left (as is Basque in Ortiz de Urbina’s hypothesis). In contrast, the barriers approach leaves room for that possibility, all other things being equal. In particular this sort of example should exist if no barrier (technically, a category with a lexical speciﬁer) is crossed. There are some examples of the relevant sort, for instance: (16) Zergatik zaldunak herensugea hil zuen? why knight-the-E dragon-the-A killed 3-had-3 “Why has the knight killed the dragon?” Instances like this were noted in Mitxelena (1981); Ortiz de Urbina mentions several, comparing them to similar Spanish instances noted by Torrego (1984): (17) Por qué el caballero mató al dragón? for what the knight killed.3/past to-the dragon “Why did the knight kill the dragon?” The correlation with Spanish is reasonable, but we must understand why whphrases like zergatik/por que “why” do not induce the alleged V2 effect. (18) is telling: (18) a. Zergatik (Jonek) esan du garagardoa edango duela? why J.-E say 3-have-3 beer drink-fut. 3-have-3-that “Why has Jon said that he will drink beer?” b. Por qué (Juan) dice que beberá cerveza? for what J. say.3 that drink.will.3 beer “Why does John say that he will drink beer?” Examples of this sort were introduced in Uriagereka (1988b) to illustrate the following property. (18a, b) are both grammatical with or without the intervening matrix subject; but when the subject is overt (e.g. “John”) only a matrix reading is possible for the wh-phrase, which thus asks for John’s reason for saying what he said rather than his reason for drinking beer (a reading which is possible when the intervening subject is not pronounced, in both Basque and Spanish). A barriers explanation for these contrasts is rather natural, if we assume, as is plausible, that wh-phrases like why are IP adjuncts. As an adjunct to IP in an unembedded context, movement of why to the C projection never crosses any barrier, even if IP takes the overt subject as its speciﬁer; IP excludes the adjunct. However, if the IP which why modiﬁes is embedded, then why must a fortiori cross the matrix IP were it to raise to the matrix C projection. If the matrix IP has a lexical speciﬁer, it will be a barrier for movement of why from the lower clause; on the other hand, if the matrix IP has a null speciﬁer, it is by hypothesis transparent to movement of why from the embedded clause. In this way, we predict the impossibility of why modifying the embedded clause when the matrix IP has an overt speciﬁer. 92

MINIMAL RESTRICTIONS ON BASQUE MOVEMENTS

It is unclear what the V2 analysis could say with respect to these facts. First, examples like (18) show that elements like why, when carefully examined, do in fact exhibit the alleged V2 effect (in this instance, a reading that is otherwise possible is prevented in the domain that concerns us). But then, how can one account for (16) or (17)? Given the possible readings in (18), the V2 approach is forced into a rather ad hoc analysis to capture the difference between (16)/(17) on the one hand and (18) on the other.11 L&U also note that (19) is marginally possible:12 (19) ? Nor horregatik etorriko litzake? who-A because.of.this come-Asp 3-have-3 “Who would come because of this?” The sharp contrast in grammaticality between (19) and the paradigmatic ungrammatical instances seen so far is hard to explain in V2 terms, where nothing should separate the moved wh-phrase in the CP Spec from the (hypothetically) moved verb in C. In contrast, for a barriers analysis, it does matter whether the intervening material is sufﬁcient to create a barrier. This is arguably not the case for pure adjuncts like horregatik, a “because” type element which, as an adjunct to IP, does not serve as the speciﬁer to any category and thus will not be a barrier. The theory predicts that in these instances no barriers would be crossed upon moving over horregatik. Other types of adjuncts behave differently from causal (pure) adjuncts. For example, temporal adjuncts block movement: (20) Nor (*orduan) etorriko litzake? who-A then come-Asp 3-have-3 “Who would come then?” This again follows, under the assumption that temporal adjuncts are speciﬁers rather than adjuncts. Of course, agreement in this instance is not obviously overt, and hence the claim about overt speciﬁers is necessarily more abstract in this case. Nonetheless, there is signiﬁcant evidence in the literature that intermediate temporal and aspectual phrases may involve temporal speciﬁers in the appropriate sense, even in English (see, e.g. Thompson 1996). This treatment of some adjuncts is also very much in line with the fact in (21), which the theory predicts as well: (21) Noiz (*zaldunak) hil zuen herensugea? when knight-the-E killed 3-have-3 dragon-the-A “When has the knight killed the dragon?” Unlike a true adjunct (16)/(17), noiz “when” is sensitive to the presence of an intervening subject. This suggests that temporal adverbs are within IP, as speciﬁers of some internal projection(s). Again, it is unclear how the traditional V2 analysis can capture the subtleties of these behaviors.

93

DERIVATIONS

3.3 A difﬁculty The approach we have seen accounts for the absence of barriers between the moved wh-element and its trace. It does not matter what the relevant categories that take speciﬁers are – so long as the speciﬁers are overt (instead of pro), the theory predicts an immediate barrier. Thus, observe: (22) [Zer [pro (*Mireni) t bidali dio]] what-A M.-D sent 3-have-3-3 “What has he/she sent to Miren?” As we saw for subjects, intervening indirect objects also cause problems for whmovement. By hypothesis, this must mean that indirect objects also serve as proper speciﬁers to some category – now a standard assumption to make, which (22) offers evidence for if the present analysis is on track. Nonetheless, we must extend the claim even further to give a full account of the facts, since indeed no lexical speciﬁer can intervene between the moved whphrase and the trace, nor between this trace and the verb. Notice that, at this point, it is not at all obvious why the latter statement should be true. Of course, claiming that direct objects also serve as speciﬁers to some category is no more controversial than making the claim for indirect objects.13 The puzzling difﬁculty, though, is that a direct object creates a barrier for subject movement: (23) [Nork [t [(*ogia) bidali dio]]] who-E bread-the-A sent 3-has-3-3 “Who has sent (him/her) the bread?” Why should the presumably lower speciﬁer occupied by the object ever matter for the movement of the subject? A solution to this puzzle comes from denying that (23) is how subject movement proceeds. If the subject had to extract from a position lower than that of the object in its speciﬁer, then we would expect the intervention effect: (24) [Nork [… [(*ogia)[t … bidali dio]]]] (24) is reminiscent of the analysis that Rizzi (1990: 62 and ff.) provides for Italian subject extraction.14 According to this view, the standard subject position, where it checks Case, is not a possible extraction site, essentially because of the “heaviness” of Agr. Under this perspective, subject extraction is forced into a roundabout movement, i.e. from inside the VP (details to follow). The L&U analysis predicts why the subject should not be able to extract from its Case position: the subject itself serves as the full lexical speciﬁer of IP, paradoxically inducing the very barrier that it must move over.15 Of course, if the subject extracts from its VP internal position, it will be sensitive to any other intervening lexical speciﬁers. This view of subject extraction captures the adjacency between the trace of the moved element and the verb, just as the initial proposal guarantees the adjacency between the trace and its antecedent whphrase. At this point, we have a full, though still mere, description of the facts: 94

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wh-movement from VP internal positions is sensitive to the presence of overt speciﬁers, which block it, unlike their null counterparts. 3.4 Beyond a description As a ﬁrst step in understanding the description above, there are two important questions to ask. First, can we provide principled motivation for the crosslinguistic differences in extraction? Speciﬁcally, the Germanic languages typically allow movement over a fully speciﬁed IP: (25) I wonder what [John sent t] In contrast, the pro-drop Romance languages are not so easily analyzed, and lead us to proposals along the lines of Rizzi’s in which the “heaviness” of Agr is responsible for different extraction patterns: Romance languages (and Basque, extending the claims to all agreeing heads) have extra barriers where Germanic ones do not. But this observation concerning morphological differences is not an explanation; we must recast the intuition as a precise analysis. In part we have. We could deﬁne barriers as categories of a certain morphological weight, as in Uriagereka (1988a). But such an approach is unsatisfactory if we adopt minimalist assumptions, in particular the idea that mechanisms of the computational system must be seen to follow from interface conditions or from conceptual necessity. In this case, if we deﬁne barriers as categories of a certain morphological weight, we are forced to ask: why does “heaviness” of agreement make such a difference in the emergence of barriers? The second question to ask, to transcend our description, concerns new problems posed by the present approach: how does the trace of the wh-element in a non-Case Position become visible (or how does it check Case)? Similarly, if whmovement across a category with a lexical speciﬁer is impossible in the relevant languages, why is A-movement possible in the simplest of sentences? (26) [Jonek [Mireni [ogia [t t t bidali dio]]]] J.-E M.-D bread-the-A sent 3-have-3-3 “Jon has sent Miren the bread.” To make their barriers analysis work, L&U were forced to adopt the now minimalist assumption that arguments move to Case speciﬁers. But if such a view is correct, then some of the movements in (26) will have to cross overt speciﬁers, unless some alternative route is found. In the remainder of this chapter, I shall address these issues within the Minimalist Program.16

4 Barriers in the minimalist system 4.1 Minimalist assumptions The Minimalist Program attempts to derive all restrictions on derivations from either bare output conditions (natural interactions with extra-syntactic 95

DERIVATIONS

components) or virtually conceptually necessary properties of the linguistic system. Within the latter rubric, Chomsky (1995b) includes economy, understood as a fundamental property of the natural world. Economy manifests itself in a variety of ways, both in the design of the system and its structural units, and in the computation of derivations and their alternatives. For example, the very deﬁnition of a proper chain presupposes that it involves shortest links (the Minimal Link Condition, MLC). Such a convergence condition is an instance of economy in the computation of derivations: a chain link which is not the shortest possible is not valid and thus the derivation does not converge. One way Chomsky (1995b: 297) seeks to formulate the MLC is by viewing movement, the mechanism which generates chains, as a consequence of Attract. That is, a given phrase marker K with feature F attracts the nearest available feature F which meets the demands of F. Movement of phrase marker containing F is a side-effect; although F only really attracts F, must for some reason take a “free ride” with F. As such, movement is taken to be rather like (so-called) pied-piping of a preposition when its object moves. Apart from economy in its structural design, the system is taken to manifest a kind of internal computational economy. Thus, given alternative derivations starting in the same array of lexical items, the derivation involving fewest steps eliminates the alternatives. In this instance, we crucially choose among competing, convergent candidates. These two sorts of explanations (conditions on convergence and optimality races) are the only kinds of accounts that minimalism favors.17 This means we only allow ourselves to propose a restriction of the sort “Movement across a lexical speciﬁer is impossible” if an account cannot be otherwise derived from conditions on convergence or optimality races. In other words, such an ad hoc restriction is clearly neither a criterion for ranking derivations nor an obviously natural condition on convergence, and therefore does not meet the demands of minimalism in its purest form. 4.2 The essential elements for an analysis It would seem, then, that we are left without any room for expressing barriertype restrictions. However, if we take seriously the idea that movement is triggered by Attract, it is possible to blame the system’s dynamics for the observed effects, vis-à-vis movement across lexical speciﬁers. Given the assumption that a primary mechanism of the computational system is the attraction of some feature F to a feature F, we are in a position to recognize that Move is an ancillary operation triggered by Attract. In other words, while the bare requirement of the computational system is simply the displacement of F to F – and such movement of a feature would be characteristic of computations in the “covert” syntax, as in (27a) – cases of “overt” movement are arguably related to the morphological structure of the category which contains the attracted feature. Under this view, is not a well-formed PF object once F moves to F. Hence, while Attract strips F away from , Move brings 96

MINIMAL RESTRICTIONS ON BASQUE MOVEMENTS

back to the domain where F has landed (27b), thus allowing for the repair of the morphological integrity of the lexical association (, F): (27) a.

b.

K H(K)

KP

L

K

… …

H(K) F'

… F' … Attract

L H(K)

… t …

Move

I suggest that this analysis of movement, as generalized “pied-piping,” provides a way to account for why overt speciﬁers induce barriers while a similar null element (pro) does not. In order to understand the connection between barriers and overt speciﬁers, it is necessary to make explicit certain assumptions involved in viewing movement as an ancillary operation. To begin with, as outlined above, the ancillary movement of is a consequence of the morphological integrity of the (, F) relation; notice, however, that proposing ancillary movement to establish conﬁgurational closeness between and F does not, in itself, provide a precise statement about how the morphological integrity of is re-established. To that end, suppose there is a morphological operation which repairs the (, F) relation: (28)

KP

K L

H(K) Repair F'

H(K)

… t …

Such an operation makes sense if the reason moves to the same domain as the attracted F is to repair some damage to the lexical integrity of . Proposing the operation in (28) implicates two additional assumptions. First, assuming that morphological operations proceed as the derivation unfolds, the pair (, F), as well as the conﬁguration whose checking domain these elements occupy (KP in (28)), will have to be shipped to the morphological component at the point (28) applies. Suppose that what it means to be “shipped to the morphological component” is in fact a function of Spell-out, much as in Chomsky’s (1995b) original proposal. Thus, the morphological repair of (, F) in (28) requires that the minimal structure containing and F, i.e. KP, is spelled out at that point in the derivation. But given the assumption that the morphological repair implicates Spell-out, we must ask what happens in the derivation when KP is indeed spelled out. If 97

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we take the original intuition behind Spell-out at face value, then once the PF and LF features contained in KP are stripped away and shipped to the respective interfaces, KP is no longer available to overt syntactic computation given that it has, derivationally speaking, gone to PF and LF: (29)

continue merging KP to PF

F'

K H(K)

L

to LF

… t …

Then we can reach two conclusions about speciﬁers. They are created due to a morphological association between an attracted feature and the category it was stripped away from. The morphological repair of (, F), an operation invoked after the Spell-out of the category containing and F, creates a sort of “giant compound” which is no longer transparent to any further syntactic operation.18 Before moving directly to the connection between overt speciﬁers and barriers, let us ﬁrst be completely explicit about the details of the above assumptions. First of all, the suggestion in (29) is an example of a “dynamically split” model of the sort argued for in Chapter 3, which goes back to early work by Bresnan, Jackendoff, Lasnik, and others. For empirical and theoretical reasons that are beyond the scope of this discussion, it is both possible and desirable to access Spell-out in successive derivational cascades as the derivation unfolds (see Chomsky 2000).19 Allowing Spell-out to apply more than once is, in fact, the null hypothesis, if we take Spell-out to be a mere derivational rule rather than a level of representation (such as S-structure). Nevertheless, assuming that Spell-out has cost, economy alone favors a tendency for the rule to apply as infrequently as possible. This must mean that the morphological repair strategy in (28) is a condition for convergence. If without it the derivation crashes, it is irrelevant to ask how costly an alternative derivation with a single Spell-out would be – there is no such alternative. A second important assumption concerns the cyclicity of the system, feeding morphology cyclicly as the derivation proceeds. The assumption is nothing but a version of the Distributed Morphology proposal in Halle and Marantz (1993), needed in this instance so as not to allow us to proceed derivationally beyond a projection of X only to come back to X and readjust it as the derivation maps to PF (though see Section 5, when Lexical-relatedness is brought to bear on these issues). In other words, the morphological repair strategy in (28) must be as much a “syntactic” (cyclic) process as movement or deletion. 98

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A third (set of) assumption(s) relates to the fact that we separate those languages in which a lexical speciﬁer blocks movement from those languages in which it does not. Following Rizzi’s (1990) suggestion, we should recognize this distinction as another consequence of the independently needed pro-drop parameter, extended to any functional category capable of licensing pro. In brief, only “heavy” categories which support pro go into Spell-out upon hitting a lexical speciﬁer. This of course raises the question of why “light” categories pose no such problems. Given the logic of the system, the answer must be that the morphological repair in (28) only affects “heavy” categories, or alternatively (and perhaps relatedly) that “light” categories involve their speciﬁer in terms of direct selectional requirements, instead of invoking the morphological repair above.20 If so, a light X will not force an application of Spell-out, which entails that if a category moves to the speciﬁer of X in such a language, it will not induce a “barrier” effect. Given the system outlined above, we are now in a position to address the central question at hand. The reason why a category speciﬁed by pro does not constitute a barrier is direct under one last assumption: pro is a feature. If pro is simply F, an F with no related morpho-phonological content, then the attraction of F to some head will not induce the ancillary operation (27b), no application of Spell-out is necessary, and consequently no barrier emerges. Notice that this analysis of pro has an attractive consequence vis-à-vis minimalism: given minimalist assumptions, there is no obvious room in the theory for a pro speciﬁer.21 However, under the analysis proposed here, we can see that pro is not actually a speciﬁer in the conﬁgurational sense. Rather, in a language with a heavy feature, speciﬁers are created as a consequence of the morphological repair operation, and since there is no need for any morphological repair for a would-be pro speciﬁer, we need not complicate the system by trying to motivate the existence of pro speciﬁers. But even if pro cannot exist as a speciﬁer, it can exist as the attracted F. Needless to say, whether this account is plausible depends on the soundness and naturalness of the four assumptions just mentioned: Multiple Spell-Out, Distributed (cyclic) Morphology, heavy categories (which license pro) requiring a given morphological repair when involving overt speciﬁers, and pro understood as a feature. The ﬁrst two are natural extensions of a model understood to be a dynamically derivational system. The other two are more speciﬁc assumptions concerning the pro-drop parameter; one is an extension of the tradition of pro as a pronominal feature on a functional category (where the subject is somehow encoded through agreement);22 the other is an extension of the proposal that movement is an epiphenomenon, i.e. movement emerges as the consequence of various sub-operations, as discussed in Chomsky (1995b: Chapter 4). In sum, the analysis explains why overt speciﬁers, in languages with agreement, induce a barrier to movement: the morphological integrity of the lexical items force the Spell-out of the structure they are speciﬁers of, subsequently rendering that structure unavailable to further syntactic computation (15). In contrast, corresponding structures without an overt speciﬁer (14) do not induce 99

DERIVATIONS

Spell-out (because of economy), and thus such structures are transparent to movement. Languages without agreement are immune to these matters, hence allowing movement across lexical speciﬁers (25). 4.3 Typological distributions Typologically, the following picture emerges. (I set aside whatever triggers Move independently of Attract – Extended Projection Principle effects – and concentrate on pro-drop.) Possible parameters involved in the Attract process arise with respect to the sub-labels of the attracting head and the attracted feature itself. The attracting head may or may not be heavy; the former case forces overt movement (assuming that movement which is unnecessary by PF procrastinates). The attracted feature may or may not be pronounced, the former case forcing the ancillary operation that leads to morphological repair, and hence early Spell-out. Given this view, we can think of a heavy attracting head – in relevant languages – as nothing but an Agr element added as a feature of the attracting head to the lexical array. An unpronounced attracted feature is just pro. Why does Agr license pro? Because a heavy attracting head must attract a feature F, and pro is nothing but a possible (in fact, null) manifestation of F. Note that, from this perspective, we should not ﬁnd instances in which pro is generally obligatory, without ever presenting a corresponding overt version with a full (pronominal) speciﬁer. This accounts for the otherwise peculiar fact that although there are languages with overt but not null pronouns (English, French), and both overt and null pronouns (Basque, Spanish), there do not seem to be languages with null but not overt pronouns. Interestingly, there is no logical necessity for pro to be licensed through Agr: a language may exist with no heavy target for pro, and this element may survive its base-generated position as an unattracted feature with no PF reﬂex. This is presumably at the core of the null categories witnessed in East Asian languages like Japanese, which do not have agreement correlates: (30) a. [Osamu-ga [Keiko-o [aisiteru]]] Osamu-S Keiko-o love “Osamu loves Keiko.” b. [pro [pro [aisiteru]]] “He/she loves him/her.” Jaeggli and Saﬁr (1989) speak of two major distributions for pro: languages with rich agreement have it, and so do languages with no agreement. This generalization ﬁts nicely in the present picture, the relevant parameter being whether pro is attracted out of VP or whether it instead remains within VP, as a reviewer aptly suggests. Apart from their typological signiﬁcance, Japanese facts are also important with respect to the issue of barrierhood: we predict that a lexical speciﬁer in the sort of language where pro is not “licensed” morphologically does not induce a 100

MINIMAL RESTRICTIONS ON BASQUE MOVEMENTS

barrier, in spite of the fact that this speciﬁer appears in free variation with pro (27a/b). Japanese topicalization argues for this result: (31) [Keiko-o [Osamu-ga [t [aisiteru]]]] Keiko-o Osamu-S love “Keiko, Osamu loves.” Importantly, Keiko-o can topicalize over Osamu-ga, thus presumably over an IP which may (and does in this instance) take a lexical speciﬁer.

5 Issues on A-movement 5.1 What is involved in a cycle? As we have seen, overt speciﬁers in languages with heavy agreement will induce barriers to movement. But if the analysis is correct, then we encounter the following problem: these speciﬁers will themselves create barriers for one another. In other words, in simple sentences like (26), which involve multiple movements to the various speciﬁer positions, movement should be blocked. This section provides a solution to this puzzle. There is an easy and a difﬁcult part to the solution. The easy part is the logic of this proposition: we have to somehow prevent the application of morphological operation (28) when dealing with A-movement across “the next” speciﬁer. If (28) does not apply, the system will not create the “giant compound” in (29), and consequently no barrier will be induced. As a result, A-movement can proceed over the relevant speciﬁer as it would over the corresponding pro, according to fact. The difﬁcult part, of course, is explaining why the logic of that crucial proposition should in fact hold. The answer lies at the core of the A/A distinction. Providing a principled motivation for such a distinction has always been difﬁcult, but it is more so within minimalism, where notations are forced to follow from bare output conditions. Chomsky’s (1995b) suggestion for the relevant split is the notion L(exical)-relatedness: A-positions are L-related, A positions are not. I re