Provocative Syntax
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Provocative Syntax
A new theory of syntactic movement within a Chomskyan framework. 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. In Provocative Syntax, Phil Branigan examines the forces that drive syntactic movement and offers a new synthetic model of the basic movement operation by reassembling in a novel way isolated ideas that 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, Branigan 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.
A Syntax of Substance
A new approach to grammar and meaning of relational nouns is presented along with its empirical consequences. In A Syntax of Substance, David Adger proposes a new approach to phrase structure that eschews functional heads and labels structures exocentrically. His proposal simultaneously simplifies the syntactic system and restricts the range of possible structures, ruling out the ubiquitous (remnant) roll-up derivations and forcing a separation of arguments from their apparent heads. This new system has a number of empirical consequences, which Adger explores in the domain of relational nominals across different language families, including Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Polynesian, and Semitic. He shows that the relationality of such nouns as hand, edge, or mother—which seem to have as part of their meaning a relation between substances—is actually part of the syntactic representation in which they are used rather than an inherent part of their meaning. This empirical outcome follows directly from the new syntactic system, as does a novel analysis of PP complements to nouns and possessors. Given this, he argues that nouns can, in general, be thought of as simply specifications of substance, differentiating them from true predicates. A Syntax of Substance offers an innovative contribution to debates in theoretical syntax about the nature of syntactic representations and how they connect to semantic interpretation and linear order.
Syntax in the Treetops
A proposal that syntax extends to the domain of discourse in making core syntax link to the conversational context. In Syntax in the Treetops, Shigeru Miyagawa proposes that syntax extends into the domain of discourse by making linkages between core syntax and the conversational participants. Miyagawa draws on evidence for this extended syntactic structure from a wide variety of languages, including Basque, Japanese, Italian, Magahi, Newari, Romanian, and Spanish, as well as the language of children with autism. His proposal for what happens at the highest level of the tree structure used by linguists to represent the hierarchical relationships within sentences—“in the treetops”—offers a unique contribution to the new area of study sometimes known as “syntacticization of discourse.” Miyagawa’s main point is that syntax provides the basic framework that makes possible the performance of a speech act and the conveyance of meaning; although the role that syntax plays for speech acts is modest, it is critical. He proposes that the speaker-addressee layer and the Commitment Phrase (the speaker’s commitment to the addressee of the truthfulness of the proposition) occur together in the syntactic treetops. In each succeeding chapter, Miyagawa examines the working of each layer of the tree and how they interact.