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This volume offers the reader a wide and updated view of some of the most important approaches to three key questions in contemporary syntactic theory: What are the operations available for (syntactic) structure-building in natural languages? What are the triggers behind those structure-building operations? Which constraints operate on the structure-building operations available? All the chapters in this book aim at providing new answers to these questions on the basis of a detailed discussion of a wide range of phenomena (gapping, Right-Node-Raising, Comparative Deletion, Across-the-Board (ATB) movement, tough-constructions, nominalizations, scope interactions, wh-movement, A-movement, Case and Agreement relations, among others), and using evidence from a rich variety of languages (Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Croatian, English, German, Icelandic, Japanese, Spanish, Vata, or Vietnamese, etc.). The proposals presented clearly illustrate the shift in the locus of the explanation of linguistic phenomena that characterizes contemporary linguistic theory. A shift, in many cases, from a model which relied on properties of systems external to narrow syntax (such as the Lexicon or the PF component), to one which relies on properties of the structure-building mechanisms available.

This book provides a uniform account of various Ellipsis structures in generative grammar. Featuring previously unpublished (and hitherto unattested) empirical data from the Scandinavian languages as well as new data from English, the analysis put forward in this monograph incorporates information-structural features into the syntactic derivation of Ellipsis. The specific mechanism, which was first developed to account for the Pseudogapping construction, employs the syntactic Focus movement operation.This Focus feature, which takes the phonological prominence found on the remnants in Ellipsis structures into consideration, and triggers the relevant Focus movement, is defined such that it interacts with an E-feature, which specifies a particular part of the syntactic structure for phonological deletion. The combination of these two features thus embodies the crucial link between phonological prominence and deletion. Implemented in a phase-based framework, where the Focus feature attracts contrastive material to the phase edge (of vP, CP, and DP), whereas the E-feature specifies the relevant domain of the phase for deletion, the analysis put forward in this book establishes a general condition on Spell—Out—or non—Spell—Out—in ellipsis. As the proposed analysis of Ellipsis structures capitalizes on the interaction between focus and deletion found in all Ellipsis structures, this book provides a new perspective on the potential for unifiying elliptical phenomena in English, and leaves sufficient room to accommodate other languages. Moreover, given the fundamental principles underlying the derivation of Ellipsis proposed in this book, the analysis offered here could also be implemented successfully in other linguistic frameworks.

Chomsky showed that no description of natural language syntax would be adequate without some notion of movement operations in a syntactic derivation. It now seems likely that such movement transformations are formally simple operations, in which a single phrase is displaced from its original position within a phrase marker, but after more than fifty years of generative theorizing, the mechanics of syntactic movement are still murky and controversial. This book examines the forces that drive syntactic movement and offers a new synthetic model of the basic movement operation by reassembling isolated ideas which have been suggested elsewhere in the literature. The unifying concept is the operation of provocation, which occurs in the course of feature valuation when certain probes seek a value for their unvalued features by identifying a goal. Provocation forces the generation of a copy of the goal; the copy originates outside the original phrase marker and must then be introduced into it. In this approach, movement is not forced by the need for extra positions; extra positions are generated because movement is taking place. After presenting the central proposal and showing its implementation in the analyses of various familiar cases of syntactic movement, the author demonstrates the effects of provocation in a variety of inversion constructions; examines interactions between head and phrasal provocation within the “left periphery” of Germanic embedded clauses; and describes the details of chain formation and successive cyclic movement in a provocation model.

This book advances research on grammatical change and shows the breadth and liveliness of the field. Leading international scholars report and reflect on the latest research into the nature and outcomes of all aspects of syntactic change including grammaticalization, variation, complementation, syntactic movement, determiner-phrase syntax, pronominal systems, case systems, negation, and alignment. The chapters deploy a variety of generative frameworks, including minimalist and optimality theoretic, and bring these to bear on a wide range of languages: among the latter are typologically distinct examples from Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Greek, Korean and Japanese, Austronesian, Celtic, and Nahuatl. They draw on sociolinguistic evidence where appropriate. Taken as a whole, the volume provides a stimulating overview of key current issues in the investigation of the origins, nature, and outcome of syntactic change.

This book presents a novel semantic account of weak, or selective, islands. Weak islands are configurations that block the displacement of certain elements in a sentence. Examples of island violations with acceptable counterexamples include, ‘#How much wine haven’t you drunk?’ (but ‘Which girl haven’t you introduced to Mary?’), ‘#How does John regret that he danced at the party?’ (but ‘Who does John regret that he invited to the party?’), or ‘#How much wine do you know whether you will produce?’ (but ‘Which glass of wine do you know whether you’ll poison?’). For forty years or more explanations of the unacceptability of these island constructions have been syntactic. But syntactic accounts fail to explain why many weak-island violations are made almost acceptable by modals and attitude verbs, as in ‘How much wine aren’t you allowed to drink?’; ‘How fast do you hope Lewis didn’t drive?’; or ‘How does Romeo regret he was allowed to go to the party?’ The book puts forward a semantic analysis to account for the unacceptability of violations of negative, presuppositional, quantificational, and wh-islands, and argues that there is no need to assume abstract syntactic rules in order to derive these facts. It explains why grammaticality violations can be obviated by certain modal expressions, and why and how far the grammaticality judgments of speakers depend on the context of the utterance. If correct, this work has a fundamental consequence for the field of linguistics in general: it removes some of the most important reasons for postulating abstract syntactic rules as part of UG.