Five Notes on Recursive Syntax

LINCOM Europa: Studies in Theoretical Linguistics, 61. ISBN: 978-3-86288-988-4 (Hardbound), 2019

My Acknowledgements go out to several people & experiences, all of which have in one way or another helped to inform my understanding of syntax. Noam Chomsky, particularly his Spring 1995 University College London lectures during which he unveiled his Minimalist Program stands out most in my memory. I can still recall the buzz in the room we all felt as young Ph.D. students at the time, as a type-o correction was still being hashed-out, under our breath, over the fresh manuscript—‘correcting an “A-position” to an “Ā-bar position”’, (it seems the bar had failed to be properly inserted in the draft manuscript above the A-argument position, and so we collectively talked about its subsequent correction, the error which was found on so and so page). Or, I can clearly recall another ‘daunting’ question of whether or not Icelandic had certain movement properties? (I don’t think we ever settled that question on the day). Chomsky’s opening remark was: ‘So, I see I have you all on the edge of your seats’ (a real fire-hazard to be sure: the auditorium was so packed that many of us had to squeeze tightly with our neighbor, two to a single seat). I remember Chomsky using the chalk-board only once that bright, London day— to draw a light verb vP with hovering multi specs, [spec>spec>vP…]: as he said, ‘This is now our minimalist theory’: I can still feel the collective jaw-drop in the room. Neil Smith at UCL never failed at the chance to have Chomsky near students whenever he came to London. Andrew Radford (my Ph.D. dissertation supervisor at Essex) knew ‘he was coming’—nothing could have prepared us for such a visit, but it is universally accepted (as he is the Cambridge University Press best-selling author of all Chomskyan syntax), that without Radford, a very large part of the theoretical-syntax community would have been even more desperately lost. Just as we were beginning, I think, to understand GB, we were now being informed to dismantle its very core, eliminating everything that was learned that generation: e.g., Spec-Head relations would surrender to probe-goal relations, AGR projections (AGR-O) would be forever lost to us, the idea that all was to be compressed into a prosaic Merge/Move-operation, etc., and much, much more—such once-prized concepts now being forever relegated to the dusty archives of Government & Binding. I thank Andrew for our wonderful ongoing correspondences, whether or not the topic is minimalist syntax, or just plain maximalist ‘life and such-like’. I thank Harald Clahsen who exposed our Essex research group to the important works of Steven Pinker and Gary Marcus at the time (among so many others who came to give talks on connectionism)…these guys were hot off the press back then. The pending debates with Jeff Elman, and the rest of the Southern California PDP-group, whose leanings towards ‘language as connectionism’ stimulated much of our discussion. My personal correspondences and/or ‘after- talk’ chats with the likes of Neil Smith, Nina Hyams, Alec Marantz and Tom Roeper were always so stimulating that after each of my/their visits, I always felt the impending impulse to immediately go home and draw syntactic trees: yes, light verb vP-trees, (with multi spec positions). I thank all my colleagues of the faculty of linguistics at California State University— Northridge, where I have been a proud part of this fine theoretical department over the past twenty years.

This article proposes certain modifications to the minimalist system, among which labeling plays a prominent role. It argues for a specific model of cyclic Transfer, where every operation Merge constitutes a phase. The operation labeling is a prerequisite of Transfer and can be delayed. This allows syntactic objects to escape from a phase. Because of the early Transfer, movement is triggered by a greedy feature on the moving syntactic object. It will be shown that the proposed system can straightforwardly derive the following movement phenomena: freezing effects, order preservation in multiple movement, the prohibition of headless XP-movement and the ban on acyclic combinations of incorporations. It will be also shown that the proposal has certain advantages over Chomsky's minimalist system.

Much of the impetus behind our current thinking of syntactic theory has to do with the notion of movement operations—both at the morphological as well as at the syntactic level. The idea developed herein is that movement is no longer just a metaphor as was once used for linguistic theory—just as the syntactic tree is no longer a mere model of syntax—but rather that 'movement up the syntactic tree' has become better understood as bearing a real physiological relevancy regarding how aspects of morphosyntactic displacement get pegged to certain cortical regions of the brain. In other words, linguistic theory has now become biology, and biology is maturational. Hence, the nature of syntactic movement and whether or not it occurs at early stages of child language development has become the central focus which undergirds much of the literature on child syntax, making-up a maturational-based brain-to-language corollary. In this chapter, we will take a closer look at recursive Move [z i , [x, y, z i ]] and its sister operation Merge [x + y = z] and see if the two follow from a biologically-determined maturational timeline, as evidenced by the data. Regarding child language acquisition, theoretical implications follow which demonstrate a Merge over Move account of developmental syntax. Regarding theoretical syntax (as assumed by the Minimalist Program (MP)), implications can be drawn which suggest that the notion of Phase—which had earlier been assumed to cover only vP, CP (Chomsky 2000)—can be extended to any constituency which is 'affected' both at the syntactic and/or semantic levels at transfer by the presence or absence of movement. Thus MOVE defines the phase, as it defines whether or not the string advances up the tree for additional feature checking. The MOVE/Phase Axiom: (a) If movement blocks a constituency from transfer/interpretation, than that constituency is a phase. (Transfer is denoted with the symbol [ /$/ ] placed in front of constituent). (b) Otherwise all stings must transfer as early as possible in the derivation. Whether a string transfers, it not being blocked by movement, than that string is a phase.

The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 7, 2012

2008

There is a tendency in science to proceed from descriptive methods towards an adequate explanatory theory and then move beyond its conclusions. Our purpose is to discover the concepts of computational efficiency in natural language that exclude redundancy, and to investigate how these relate to more general principles. By developing the idea that linguistic structures possess the features of other biological systems this article focuses on the third factor that enters into the growth of language in the individual. It is suggested that the core principles of grammar can be observed in nature itself. The Faculty of Language is an efficient mechanism designed for the continuation of movement in compliance with optimization requirements. To illustrate that, a functional explanation of syntactic Merge is offered in this work, and an attempt is made to identify some criteria that single out this particular computational system as species-specific.

1965

Text, Speech and Language Technology, 2014

In this chapter I will be concerned with what characterizes human language and the parser that computes it in real communicative situations. I will start by discussing and dismissing Hauser et al. (2002) (HC&F) disputed claim that the "only uniquely human component of the faculty of language" be "recursion". I will substantiate my rejection of HC&F's claims, with the fact that recursion only appears in mature and literate language-an opinion also shared by some papers in a book on recursion by Harry van der Hulst (2010). I will then present in detail Chomsky's proposal-now part of the Minimalist Theory (MT)-of the architecture of the human parser as being based on Phases. I will accept this part of the theory and compare it with the computational architecture contained in a system for deep text understanding called Getaruns (Delmonte 2007). I will then argue in favour of what I regard the peculiar component of human language faculty that is "the ability to associate meaning to deficient propositions and generic linguistic expressions, which are highly ambiguous in their structure". And this is also due to the presence of recursion (but not only). I will then speak in favour of a parser that takes "context'' into account and strives for a "complete" syntactic representation. As to the problem of ambiguity, I will introduce the use of a computational device, a lookahead mechanism, which is presented in association with the need to specify UG parameters characterizing a given language. I will discuss the use of psychologically viable Parsing Strategies implemented in the parser to overcome ambiguity and prevent Garden Path, whenever possible. This will be highlighted by reference to peculiar features associated to different languages, Italian and English. Eventually, I will present a theory that encompasses all my previous proposals and is called LSLT.

Journal of Linguistics, 2015

Recursion and Human Language, 2010

ENGLISH LINGUISTICS, 2007