Showing papers on "Antisymmetry published in 1994"

The antisymmetry of syntax

Abstract: Part 1: introduction deriving X-bar theory. Part 2: adjunction world order further consequences. Part 3: coordination complementation relatives and possessives extraposition. Part 4: conclusion.

Coordination, ATB, and ellipsis

Abstract: "Shared constituents" such as what did in (3) are then to be handled in terms of ellipsis. In short, I advocate a return to the "large-conjunct-plus-reduction" conception of coordinations associated with early generative grammar (Chomsky 1957) although with reduction understood as "ellipsis" of terminals (PF-material) and not as deletion of syntactic structure. If (1/2) is replaced by (5b.), conjunctions uniting clauses can be seen as "discourse connectives", heads that take root clauses as their arguments. This conception fits most naturally with the idea mat coordinate structures should not be treated as symmetrical, n-ary branching, and multi-headed exceptions to XMheory (in particular, to the binary branching hypothesis of Kayne (1984), and the antisymmetry hypothesis of Kayne (1993)). However, it may be necessary to allow for "embedded" coordination I n coordination seems a pretty clear case, motivated on syntactic grounds. But I see no reason for assuming conjuncts can be any smaller than complete "extended projections" in the sense of Grimshaw (1991). If correct men the rationale for assuming ATB-rule application disappears. Further argumentation builds on the following points:

Notes on the Antisymmetry of Syntax

Abstract: In what proved to be probably the most influential Principles-and-Parameters manuscript of the last year, Kayne (1993) has proposed 1) a Linear Correspondence Axiom which together with a particular definition of (asymmetric) c-command is supposed to allow only SVO and OVS as underlying word orders and 2) an abstract beginning node asymmetrically c-commanding all other nodes which is supposed to further exclude OVS so that one arrives at the conclusion that SVO constitutes the universal underlying word order. Below, I argue against this conclusion on both theoretical and empirical grounds. While the Linear Correspondence Axiom has desirable effects on clause structure (cf. section 3), neither it nor the assumption of an abstract beginning node has any effects on word order.1 In particular, Kayne's system actually allows not only SVO and OVS, but also SOV and VOS (cf. section 4). Moreover, it will not do to simply stipulate SVO as the universal underlying word order since word order in German, a language traditionally analyzed as being underlyingly SOV, cannot be adequately treated in the universal SVO approach, especially when it is compared with word order in Yiddish, a closely related SVO language (cf. section 5). The next section introduces the theoretical machinery of Kayne (1993). It should be read even by those who are already familiar with Kayne's paper, since the exposition of the linear ordering concept given in section 2 will help the reader to understand the central theoretical arguments in section 4. Comments University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive Science Technical Report No. IRCS-94-05. This technical report is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/ircs_reports/151