Browse

This book rejects the notion that an English phrase of the form verb + determiner phrase [V + DP] invariably involves a grammatical relation properly characterized as a direct object. It argues instead that at least three distinct relations occur in such a structure. The different syntactic properties of these three kinds of objects are shown by how they behave in passives, middles, -able forms, tough movement, wh-movement, Heavy NP Shift, Ride Node Raising, re-prefixation, and many other tests. This proposal renders the book’s position sharply different from that of Noam Chomsky, who defined a direct object structurally as noun phrase, verb phrase [NP, VP], and with the traditional linguistics text’s definition of the direct object as the DP sister of V. According to the book’s framework, sentence structures are complex graph structures built on nodes (vertices) and edges (arcs). The node that heads a particular edge represents a constituent which bears the grammatical relation named by the edge label to its tail node. This approach allows two DPs that have very different grammatical properties to occupy what looks like identical structural positions. The contrasting behaviors of direct objects, which at first seem anomalous—even grammatically chaotic—emerge in Postal’s account as nonanomalous, as symptoms of hitherto ungrasped structural regularity.

Vowel harmony results from a set of restrictions that determine the possible and impossible sequences of vowels within a word. The study of syntax begins with the observation that the words of a sentence cannot go in just any order, and the study of phonology begins with the same observation for the consonants and vowels of a word. This book investigates long-distance relations between vowels in vowel harmony systems across a range of languages, with the aim of demonstrating that the locality conditions which regulate these relations can be attributed to the same principle that regulates long-distance syntactic dependencies. It argues that vowel harmony represents a manifestation of the Agree algorithm for feature-valuation (formulated by Noam Chomsky in 2000), as part of an overarching effort to show that phonology can be described in terms of the principles of the Minimalist Program. The book demonstrates that the principle of target-driven search, the phenomenon of defective intervention, and the principles regulating the size of the domain over which dependencies are computed apply to both phonological and syntactic phenomena. It offers phonologists new evidence that viewing vowel harmony through the lens of relativized minimality has the potential to unify different levels of linguistic representation and different domains of empirical inquiry in a unified framework. Moreover, the book’s specific implementation of the locality of dependencies represents a major advance in understanding constraints on possible harmonic languages.

Paul Kiparsky's work in linguistics has been wide ranging and fundamental. Kiparsky's contributions as a scholar and teacher have transformed virtually every subfield of contemporary linguistics, from generative phonology to poetic theory. This collection of essays on the word—the fundamental entity of language—by Kiparsky's colleagues, students, and teachers reflects the distinctive focus of his own attention and his influence in the field. As the editors of the book observe, Kiparsky approaches words much as a botanist approaches plants, fascinated equally by their beauty, structure, and evolution. The chapters in the book reflect these multiple perspectives. The contributors discuss phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics bearing on the formal composition of the word; historical linguistic developments emphasizing the word's simultaneous idiosyncratic character and participation in a system; and metrical and poetic forms showing the significance of Kiparsky's ideas for literary theory. Collectively they develop the overarching idea that the nature of the word is not directly observable but nonetheless inferable.

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 offers cross-linguistic evidence that adjectives have two sources. Arguing against the standard view, and reconsidering his own earlier analysis, the author proposes that adjectives enter the nominal phase either as “adverbial” modifiers to the noun or as predicates of reduced relative clauses. Some of his evidence comes from a systematic comparison between Romance and Germanic languages. These two language families differ with respect to the canonical position taken by adjectives, which is prenominal in Germanic and both pre- and postnominal in Romance. The author shows that a simple N(oun)-raising analysis encounters a number of problems, the primary one of which is its inability to express a fundamental generalization governing the interpretation of pre- and postnominal adjectives in the two language families. He argues that N-raising as such should be abandoned in favor of XP-raising—a conclusion also supported by evidence from other language families. After developing this framework for analyzing the syntax of adjectives, the author applies it to the syntax of English and Italian adjectives. An appendix offers a brief discussion of other languages that appear to distinguish overtly between the two sources of adjectives.