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This chapter examines wh-agreement in Kinande and establishes that is does not indicate movement has taken place. Therefore, wh-agreement cannot be taken as evidence for feature motivated intermediate checking of links in an A'-movement chain. It is established that the displaced wh-expression is related to the site where it is interpreted via multiple resumptive elements. This suggests that minimalism must consider the possibility of base-generating multiple resumptive copies, thereby posing the non-trivial question of how relevant links emerge.

This chapter marks a case for cyclicity conditions at several levels, all of which seem compatible, although they might originate from different causes. The first situation analyzed involves compounds, and the reason to go into cyclicity considerations is raised by the difficulty of characterizing, in Bare Phrase Structure terms, what is the head of a compound. It examines to what extent compounds themselves are productive in a language like English, or whether the alleged productivity arises in instances that would show it is actually to be discharged into less intriguing specifications of the phrasal sort (nominal modification). It also suggests that parametric conditions may arise for cyclicities of the MSO form, based on whether null arguments are permitted in any given language.

This chapter situates the present system within the tradition it comes from, in the process examining foundational concerns about the overall architecture and how this has influenced other lines of research. It begins by reviewing earlier models (the Extended Standard Theory and the Principles and Parameters system) — precursors of the Minimalist Program — to show how the roots of how cyclicity is addressed in this book are very much within the spirit of earlier proposals. It then moves on to the best known cyclic system in contemporary studies, which proposes that derivations run transitioning from one phase to the next. It shows how this system is compatible with the MSO architecture, as they are addressing different aspects of cyclicity — a condition that makes good derivational sense. The theme of justifying the derivational nature of the linguistic architecture is further explored in the middle sections of the chapter. It concludes with two detailed case studies in the literature, which explicitly and creatively use the MSO architecture to make predictions about reanalysis in parsing and specific conditions that arise in language development.

This chapter applies the Resource Management Theory of Resumption to data from Irish. I first present the basic clausal structure of Irish that I am adopting, based on antecedent work that is adapted to LFG using Toivonen’s theory of phrase structure. I next present an overview of the data to be analyzed, followed by detailed analyses of core Irish filler-gap and binder-resumptive dependencies. These analyses are then extended to deal with certain difficult cases known as 'mixed chains'. I conclude with a discussion of some further empirical predictions of the analysis of Irish, some directions for further research, and an extended comparison to a prominent Minimalist analysis of the Irish data.

Patterns of binding of the event variable suggest an explanation for the ungrammaticality of extraction from tensed adjuncts: the event variable is bound below Tense, so macroevent formation across Tense is impossible. This raises questions concerning extraction from tensed complement clauses. The referential opacity of bridge verbs means that the existence of only one event is implied by bridge verb constructions, while two events are implied by tensed adjunct constructions. This analysis requires that the Single Event Grouping Condition be checked cyclically. Section 7.5 returns to the CED, and shows that, although extraction from subjects and from adjuncts is quite unremarkable, the two do not pattern crosslinguistically or language-internally. In particular, the Single Event Grouping Condition has little effect on independently very restricted patterns of extraction from subjects in English. This suggests that a nonunified account of CED effects should be pursued.

The frozen lands of the north are an unforgiving place for humans to live. The Inuit view of the cosmos is that it is ruled by no one, with no gods to create wind and sun and ice, or to provide punishment or forgiveness, or to act as Earth Mother or Father. Amid those harsh landscapes, belief is superfluous, and only fear can be relied on as a guide. How could such a world begin, and end? In Nordic mythology, in ancient times there used to be a yet greater kingdom of ice, ruled by the ice giant, Ymir Aurgelmir. To make a world fit for humans, Ymir was killed by three brothers—Odin, Vilje, and Ve. The blood of the dying giant drowned his own children, and formed the seas, while the body of the dead giant became the land. To keep out other ice giants that yet lived in the far north, Odin and his brothers made a wall out of Ymir’s eyebrows. One may see, fancifully, those eyebrows still, in the form of the massive, curved lines of morainic hills that run across Sweden and Finland. We now have a popular image of Ymir’s domain—the past ‘Ice Age’—as snowy landscapes of a recent past, populated by mammoths and woolly rhinos and fur-clad humans (who would have been beginning to create such legends to explain the precarious world on which they lived). This image, as we have seen, represents a peculiarly northern perspective. The current ice age is geologically ancient, for the bulk of the world’s land-ice had already grown to cover almost all Antarctica, more than thirty million years ago. Nevertheless, a mere two and a half million years ago, there was a significant transition in Earth history—an intensification of the Earth’s icehouse state that spread more or less permanent ice widely across the northern polar regions of the world. This intensification— via those fiendishly complex teleconnections that characterize the Earth system—changed the face of the entire globe. The changes can be detected in the sedimentary strata that were then being deposited around the world.

It is a scene of devastation, as far as the eye can see. Swathes of bleak landscape, with strewn boulders embedded in a sticky mass of sandy clay. Here and there are signs of a little more order—distinct spreads of gravel or patches of fine sand. Mostly, though, it looks as though every type of sediment, from fine clay to house-sized blocks, has simply been stirred together and spread across the land. Remove the crops and topsoil of gentle Leicestershire and Suffolk, or of central Germany or Kansas, and this is what lies beneath. Between the ordered sedimentary strata of the distant geological past and the ordered calm of the present is evidence of an only-just-elapsed catastrophe, and two centuries ago, when the science of the Earth was young, the naturalists of those days pondered on what it might mean. There were those like the young William Buckland, both Reader in mineralogy at Oxford and priest (he went on to become Dean of Westminster), who saw in it evidence of the biblical Deluge. Or Jean André de Luc, mentor to the wife of George III, who considered that the large blocks had been fired, like Roman ballista, from the mountains by some powerful but mysterious explosions. Or Sir James Hall, a savant of Edinburgh, who thought that the blocks had been carried into position by tsunamis, generated when large areas of sea floor (he supposed) suddenly popped up like blisters—he was clearly of an intellectually playful disposition. Or Leopold von Buch, who invoked catastrophic mudflows (one such, indeed, did take place in an Alpine valley, the Val de Bagnes, just after von Buch’s paper on this topic was published, when a natural dam burst, scattering mud and boulders far down the valley, and killing many people). But it was that extraordinary polymath, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (a one-time Superintendent of Mines, if you please) who was among the first to sense what had been going on, when he associated the scattered blocks with a great expansion of the Alpine glaciers he was familiar with, and coined the term Eiszeit —the Ice Age.

This chapter reiterates the fundamental belief of Tibetans in cyclicity and relates this belief to Tibetan music. Various genres of music echo off one another in the daily lives of Tibetan refugees, as do ideas, habits and languages. This chapter shows that the ways different music resonate with and against one another for Tibetan refugees reveal both subtle and remarkable changes that have generated tensions and ambiguities in the community-in-exile, despite its desire for clear boundaries.

This chapter examines production regimes and their idiosyncracies, with particular reference to the co-evolution of economic and legal institutions in the varieties of capitalism. It first considers two theories that explain the institutional varieties of capitalism, namely, the theory of production regimes and the theory of institutional co-selection. It then looks at the theory of self-organising social systems as well as its critique of the theories of production regimes and co-selection. It also discusses the theory of autopoietic social systems and its emphasis on self-organisation and self-reproduction, together with the multi-polarity and cyclicity of production regimes. The chapter concludes by outlining the main assumptions of autopoiesis theory, focusing on just-in-time contracts in the United States and Germany.

In Generative Phonology, cyclicity and level ordering have long been used to account for synchronic alternations reflecting morphological relatedness between forms. Recently, however, alternatives to cyclicity have been proposed based on the notion of paradigm uniformity, including the Output–Output Correspondence approach within Optimality Theory. A number of researchers still favor traditional interleaving (cyclicity or level ordering), claiming that it is empirically or theoretically superior to paradigm uniformity in accounting for synchronic alternations. This chapter discusses vowel length, cyclicity, and Output–Output Correspondence, drawing on data from English and Turkish vowel length alternations. It considers how vowel length interacts with morphological structure, highlights relevant phenomena for vowels in open syllables, and also examines compounds with vowel-final first members.

This chapter examines the phasal analysis of syntactic derivation, focusing on reconstruction and successive cyclicity effects. It proposes a non-movement analysis of resumptive pronouns in Celtic relative clauses in which these properties are derived under a phasal analysis of Agree. This novel conception of the articulation between resumption, reconstruction, and locality shows that successive cyclicity effects are not the exclusive property of movement derivations and that the correlation of movement with reconstruction effects is not absolute. Under a phasal analysis, Move and Agree therefore can exhibit similar effects. After discussing phasal agreement in resumptive relatives, the chapter considers Agree and phases as well as resumptive pronouns as definite descriptions.

Head movement is usually diagnosed by consideration of whether there is evidence for displacement of a single‐word item. The multimorphemic character of a given form often being taken to bear on the issue, particularly when the morpheme order mirrors the order of the extended projection in the syntax. However, just as there can be head movement without affixation, there can be affixation without head movement. Even the issue of which morpheme orders can be taken as ‘mirroring’ the syntax is somewhat more complex in implementation than commonly assumed. Additional mechanisms must be at work in deriving certain types of complex forms. An analysis of the Cupeño verbal complex is argued to involve an intricate interplay of independently motivated possibilities. Finally, some of the formal problems posed by head adjunction analysis of head movement are reviewed, and a brief overview of some alternative theoretical approaches to head movement is given.

This chapter examines the diagnostics put forth for long movement in long distance questions in child language. It discusses diagnostics from comprehension studies and elicited production studies. The experimental data provide compelling arguments for full successive‐cyclic movement in child language, but has an unexpected result: evidence for partial movement as a transitional stage in language development, raising two issues. (i) Given that there are alternative analyses of partial movement in adult grammars—direct dependency vs. indirect dependency—what are the arguments that long distance questions in child grammar involve long distance movement? (ii) That children go through a stage involving a parameter setting not part of the target grammar, but reflecting a parametric setting for other languages, is expected under the Continuity Hypothesis. The question remains, however, why English children go through a partial movement stage, but a not a wh‐in situ stage, neither of which options is allowed in the target grammar.

This chapter develops an explicit theory of vowel harmony based on unary elements and lateral and positional licensing which is embedded in a general dependency-based theory of phonological structure (called ‘Radical CV Phonology’). Harmony is analyzed in terms of a licensing requirement, which results in ‘agreement’, both intra-morphemically and inter-morphemically, that is, within the domain of the word In essence, the view put forward is that lexical vowel harmony involves the selection of lexically listed allomorphs. Licensing will be the selection mechanism for the proper allomorph. The chapter discusses the treatment of morpheme-internal harmony, trigger and targets in harmony, and the notion of cyclicity.

By discussing novel data from two Dolomitic Ladin languages spoken in Northern Italy, Badiotto and Gardenese, it is shown that in these Verb Second languages subject-finite verb inversion is constrained by the syntactic (adverb or object) and discourse (focus or topic) nature of the sentence-initial constituent, and by the discourse status of the DP subject. The chapter demonstrates that in both varieties subjects in inversion either appear in a FocusP of the vP periphery or in an A position in the IP layer, and that the observed distribution of inversion follows from two universal constraints of movement affecting extraction through the vP edge: (a) cyclicity (extraction through the edge of the vP phase) and (b) locality/ Relativized Minimality (RM). By comparing the distribution of DP subjects in Ladin with that observed in other V2 languages, such as Mòcheno and Mainland Scandinavian, the chapter proposes a novel typology of V2 languages and of subject-finite verb inversion to be captured in terms of parametric variation.

This chapter has two goals, both concerning the implications of gender features on n. First, nominals that contain multiple, stacked ns are investigated. Data is presented showing that the highest n determines the gender of the nominal, and the chapter develops an explanation of this fact based on independently-motivated assumptions about morphosyntactic cyclicity. Interestingly, some diminutive nouns retain the gender of their base noun, and the chapter shows how this can be explained given current approaches to diminutive morphosyntax. The second goal of the chapter is to consider declension class, which is often inserted post-syntactically at/near n in Distributed Morphology. It is demonstrated that gender can affect the choice of declension class—as predicted if it is adjoined to n and gender is on n. The chapter presents a brief case study of declension class in Spanish, which further articulates the relationship between gender and declension class.