Displacement seen from
the presence/absence of pronunciation
– Incorporation of verb
movement into Narrow Syntax –
Mayumi Hosono,
I
argue that verb movement might naturally be incorporated into Narrow Syntax
unlike Chomsky (2001), by regarding all the displacement phenomena as
phonological. In the present system verb movement is supposed to be a PF
phenomenon, since no uninterpretable feature is supposed to be carried by a
moved verb itself (Chomsky 2001). This way of dealing with verb movement will
permit us to treat verb movement as an exception among all the kinds of
movements, which will be an undesirable situation.
Pesetsky (2000) argues, taking wh-movement as an example, that the
distinction between overt and covert movement is determined in terms of whether
the relevant wh-movement is
pronounced in situ or in the higher position. It will be desirable to extend
his idea to the other kinds of movement so that the parallelism between all
kinds of movement can be captured. Then, the expected design will be that a
verb cross-linguistically moves in Narrow Syntax, and that the difference in
the ‘traditional’ verb movement between languages is made in terms of whether
the verb is pronounced in situ or in the higher position.
Vikner (1997) argues that V-to-T movement
takes place if and only if person morphology is found in all tenses (Vikner
1997:200). His intuition implies that when a verb moves due to its person
morphology, the verb carries also some specification of tense, regardless of
whether tense is specified by an overt morpheme or not. Then, unlike the
standard assumption that T is firstly merged to v(*)P and makes a probe to
achieve the later operation (Chomsky 2000, 2001, 2002), I propose the following
way of derivation adopting the Greed-like idea in Chomsky (1995): (i) [T(ense)]
is inherently attributed to a main/finite verb (and base-generated with it in the
lexicon), (ii) the verb moves due to the uninterpretable EPP of T, and is
merged to v(*)P to become a new T node, and (iii) at the position which the
verb has reached, the EPP of [T] plays a role of a probe and seeks a goal. The
presence/absence of the agreement morpheme is assumed to determine whether the
moved verb is pronounced in situ or in the higher position.
I
claim that the proposal above will let us incorborate verb movement into Narrow
Syntax elegantly. Also I argue that the traditional problems concerning verb
movement will be solved at the same time; for instance, the way of derivation
proposed here enables a moved verb to avoid the violation of the Extension
Condition, and so on.
References
Chomsky,
N. (1995) The Minimalist Program.
Chomsky,
N. (2000) ‘Minimalist inquiries: the framework.’ In R. Martin, D. Michaels, and
J. Uriagereka (eds.), Step By Step:
Essays on Minimalist Syntax in Honor of Howard Lasnik,
Chomsky,
N. (2001) ‘Derivation By Phase.’ In M. Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken Hale: A Life in Language.
Chomsky,
N. (2002) ‘Beyond explanatory adequacy.’ In A. Belletti (ed.), (forthcoming) Structures and Beyond: Current Issues in the
Theory of Language,
Pesetsky,
D. (2000) Phrasal Movement and Its Kin.
Pollock,
J.-Y. (1989) ‘Verb movement, Universal Grammar, and the structure of IP,’ Linguistic Inquiry 20, 365-424.
Roberts,
Vikner,
S. (1997) ‘V0-to-I0 movement and inflection for person in
all tenses.’ In L. Haegeman (ed.), The
New Comparative Syntax,
Defocalization
strategy in Merge
– Parallelism of Clitic
Left Dislocation with null object construction –
Mayumi Hosono,
I
make an attempt to provide a unified account for both empty object construction
as in Chinese and Cl(itic) L(eft) D(islocation) as in Italian, by analyzing
both a null object and a clitic as the elements that are inherently defocalized
in Merge. Concerning a null object, Rizzi (1986) argues that a language has an
option of saturation in lexicon or saturation in syntax, and that the
availability of empty objects depends on the presence of saturation process in
lexicon. In (Italian) ‘Questo conduce pro
a concludere quanto segue.’ (‘This leads proi
to (PROi) conclude what follows’) a θ-role of pro is saturated when its referential
content can be recovered from the context (Rizzi 1986:508). Huang (1984),
contrary to Rizzi, argues that an empty object as in Chinese is a variable that
is bound by an empty topic. Following Huang, the structure of the example
‘Zhangsan shuo Lisi bu renshi.’ (‘Zhangsan say Lisi didn’t know [him].’) is ‘[Top
ei], [Zhangsan shuo [Lisi bu renshi ei]]’: an object is
topicalized and moves to the initial position, in which it is deleted (Huang
1984:543).
A clitic, on
the other hand, is an element that has to be attached to a functional category
(Kayne 1991). According to Cinque (1990), the clitic appears in CLLD like ‘Gianni,
lo ho visto.’ (‘Gianni, him-Cl have-1sg seen.’), in which Gianni is topicalized. The status of the clitic in CLLD has not
been clear, though. Why does a clitic show up in CLLD to begin with, though it
does not appear in focalization (Cinque 1990, Rizzi 1997)? Also, the analysis of topicalization in
general has not been fixed: whether a topicalized phrase is base-generated in
the initial position (e.g., Chomsky 1977), or it moves from the lower position
(Lasnik and Saito 1992).
Remarkable is the parallelism of CLLD with
the null object construction in Chinese. Both the referent that is associated
with a null object and the one that is connected with a clitic have topicalized
statuses. To unify their properties and seize the parallelism, I assume first
that, following Rizzi’s (1986) observation that the referential content of an
object pro can be recovered from the
context, saturation in the lexicon is a defocalization strategy in general that
makes a language available of an object pro
inherently assigned [-F(ocus)] in Holmberg’s (1999) sense. Second, I assume
that cliticization is also a defocalization strategy, and that a clitic is a
defocalization marker that has also a θ-role associated with the relevant
element, is inherently assigned [-F], and is attached to a functional category:
a clitic is base-generated in a functional category, and the canonical object
position is not created. The CLLD case can be explained as follows: the role of
a clitic that it plays in CLLD will be to show that a topicalized phrase is not
focalized in the sentence. Therefore, it appears only in CLLD, not in
focalization.
Then, I argue that the relationship between
the realization of defocalization markers and the presence of structural
positions that arguments occupy will be summarized as follows: in the case in
which a defocalization marker is overtly realized, a structural position of the
argument is unnecessary to be projected. When a language has no overt
realization of a marker, on the other hand, a structural position for an empty
pronoun has to be created.
References
Chomsky,
N. (1977) ‘On Wh-Movement.’ In P.
Culicover et al. eds., Formal Syntax.
Cinque,
G. (1990) Types of Ā–Dependencies.
Holmberg,
A. (1999) ‘Remarks on Holmberg’s generalization.’ Studia Linguistica 53, 1-39.
Huang,
C.-T. J. (1984) ‘On the Distribution and Reference of Empty Pronouns.’ Linguistic Inquiry 15, 531-574.
Kayne,
R. (1991) ‘Romance Clitics, Verb Movement, and PRO.’ Linguistic Inquiry 22, 647-686.
Lasnik,
H. and M. Saito (1992) Move α:
Conditions on Its Application and Output.
Rizzi,
L. (1986) ‘Null objects in Italian and the theory of pro.’ Liguistic
Inquiry 17, 501-57.
Rizzi, L. (1997) ‘The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery.’
In L. Haegeman ed., Elements of Grammar.
Defocalization strategy
– suppression of a phonetic
form in the canonically realized position –
Mayumi Hosono,
I
argue that the issue of an ‘apparent imperfection’ of a human language (Chomsky
2000) will shift from whether a language has displacement to whether a phonetic
form is suppressed in the position where it should canonically be realized.
Pesetsky (2000) argues that the difference between overt and covert wh-movement is phonological: the
distinction is whether a wh-phrase is
pronounced in situ or in the position to which the wh-phrase has moved (Pesetsky 2000:8). This idea should be extended
to the other kinds of movement, namely, DP movement, verb movement, and so on,
since a moved element in DP/verb movement is, if it is supposed to move at all,
pronounced in the higher position for some reason.
The problem is that the principled way has
been lacking to determine which position is pronounced and why that position is
pronounced: it has been assumed that the decision is made optionally (Chomsky
1995, 2000). Assuming that the features are, as the occurrences of the same
component, distributed to several places in the derivation (Chomsky 2000), the
point will be why in the case of ‘movement’ the phonetic form of the in-situ occurrence
is lost though nothing should prevent it from being realized there. A key to
solve this problem will, I assume, lie in the saturation process that Rizzi
(1986) proposes. He states that a θ-role is saturated (and its phonetic
form is lost) when its referential content can be recovered from the context
(Rizzi 1986:508). His statement can be extended in the way that when there
exists ‘something’ (e.g., some morphological marking or the abstract entity
like the context) that enables us to confirm the relevant element, the phonetic
form of the element can be omitted in the position in which the element should
canonically be realized. Then, I propose to formulate the saturation process as
‘defocalization strategy’ in general, which can ‘suppress’ the phonetic form of
an element if and only if some ‘manifestation’ that lets us confirm the element
can be found, for instance a morphological marking of [wh] by a wh-phrase or an agreement morpheme. I argue
that the cross-linguistic difference in the presence/absence of movement (of all
kinds) will be accounted for in terms of which position, either in situ or in
the higher position, is pronounced.
References
Chomsky,
N. (1995) The Minimalist Program.
Chomsky,
N. (2000) ‘Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework.’ In R. Martin et al. ed., Step by Step.
Pesetsky,
D. (2000) Phrasal Movement and Its Kin.
Rizzi,
L. (1986) ‘Null Objects in Italian and the Theory of pro.’ Linguistics Inquiry
17:501-557.