Full Description
This volume offers new perspectives on the tension between the rich patterns of language variation that emerge from comparative studies and the quest for simple theoretical primitives. The chapters explore the debate between Cartography and Minimalism: on the one hand, the need for detailed and articulated descriptions of the clausal architecture, and on the other, the endeavor to reduce the theoretical apparatus to fundamental computational mechanisms.
The first part of the book begins with a reflection on the goals of modern linguistic theory, and investigates the principles of human language, in an effort to subsume the regularities of particular grammars under a small set of morphosyntactic and semantic primitives. The second part examines the clausal structure - both the CP-layer and the IP-layer - from a comparative perspective, which directly relates to the fundamental questions of universality, linguistic variation, and learnability addressed in the first part of the book. With chapters written by world-leading linguists who analyze a wide range of old and new phenomena, the volume will be a valuable resource for researchers and students interested in theoretical linguistics and language development.
Contents
Giuliano Bocci, Daniele Botteri, Claudia Manetti, and Vincenzo Moscati: Introduction
Part I. Foundational issues: Principles, primitives, and explanations in generative grammar
1: Noam Chomsky: Genuine explanation
2: Gennaro Chierchia: Four types of quantifiers at the interface between syntax and logic
3: Giorgio Graffi and Alessandro Riolfi: The explanatory power of the subjacency principle
4: Ian Roberts: The Strict Cycle Condition: 'One cycle to rule them all'
5: Richard S. Kayne: A more demanding approach to suppletion
6: Adriana Belletti: Truncation vs reduction in development
Part II. Comparative perspectives on the functional structure of the clause
7: M. Rita Manzini and Anna Roussou: Recategorizing C
8: Mamoru Saito: Wh-phrases as genuine focus operators
9: Dominique Sportiche: Some (but not all) movement types systematically violate islands
10: Ronit Szterman and Naama Friedmann: Comprehension and production of sentences with V-C movement in orally-trained children with hearing impairment
11: Benedetta Baldi and Leonardo M. Savoia: Micro-variation in imperatives: Enclisis and mesoclisis in Italian and Arbëresh varieties
12: Paola Benincà and Guglielmo Cinque: The syntax of Romance clitics and selective clitic climbing
13: Andrea Calabrese: The Latin passive morpheme /-r/ and its morphosyntactic similarity with Romance SI
14: Liliane Haegeman and Lieven Danckaert: Subject ellipsis and impersonal pronouns
15: Hilda Koopman: Some basic properties of Mandarin resultative clusters: A measure of progress
16: Ur Shlonsky: From Bantu subject-object reversal to inverted copular sentences: How
