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This monograph shows that the typically obligatory nature of predicate-argument agreement in phi-features (phi-agreement) cannot be captured through “derivational time-bombs” – elements of the initial representation that cannot be part of a well-formed, end-of-the-derivation structure, and which are eliminated by the application of phi-agreement itself. This includes, but is not limited to, the ‘uninterpretable features’ of Chomsky 2000, 2001. Instead, it requires recourse to an operation – one whose invocation is obligatory, but whose successful culmination is not enforced by the grammar. The book also discusses the implications of this conclusion for the analysis of dative intervention. This leads to a novel view of how case assignment interacts with phi-agreement, and furnishes an argument that both phi-agreement and so-called “morphological case” must be computed within the syntactic component proper. Finally, the author surveys other domains where the empirical state of affairs proves well-suited for the same operations-based logic: Object Shift, the Definiteness Effect, and long-distance wh-movement.This research is based on data from the Kichean branch of Mayan (primarily from Kaqchikel), as well as from Basque, Icelandic, French, and Zulu.

A major question for linguistic theory concerns how the structure of sentences relates to their meaning. There is broad agreement in the field that there is some regularity in the way that lexical semantics and syntax are related, so that thematic roles are predictably associated with particular syntactic positions. This book examines the syntax and semantics of possession sentences, which are infamous for appearing to diverge dramatically from this broadly regular pattern. On the one hand, possession sentences have too many meanings: in a given language, the construction used to express archetypal possessive meanings (such as personal ownership) is also often used to express other apparently unrelated notions (body parts, kinship relations, and many others). On the other hand, possession sentences have too many surface structures: languages differ markedly in the argument structures used to convey the same possessive meanings, with some employing a transitive verb HAVE, and others using a variety of constructions based around an intransitive verb BE. Examining and synthesizing ideas from the literature and drawing on data from many languages (including some understudied Quechua dialects), this book presents a novel way to understand the apparent irregularity of possession sentences while preserving existing explanations for the general cross-linguistic regularities we observe in argument structure.

Current Minimalist approaches to syntax claim that languages simply vary in the distribution of overt movement. Some languages have overt wh-movement, or EPP effects, or movement of the verb to T, for example, while others do not, and these are basic parameters of cross-linguistic difference, which cannot be made to follow from any other properties of the languages in question. This book offers a theory of the cross-linguistic distribution of overt movement. The central claim is that the construction of phonological representations begins during the syntactic derivation, and that overt movement is driven by universal phonological conditions. The conditions include one on the prosodic representations of syntactic relations like Agree and selection (Generalized Contiguity) and another on the relation between affixes and word-level metrical structure (Affix Support). The parameters differentiating languages are entirely a matter of prosody and morphology: languages differ in how their prosodic systems are arranged, in the number and nature of affixes appearing on the verb, and in the rules for word-internal stress placement. The resulting theory accounts for the distribution of wh-movement, head-movement of verbs and auxiliaries, and EPP-driven movement to the specifier of TP, in a number of languages. If the theory is correct, then a complete description of the phonology and morphology of a given language is also a complete description of its syntax.

A convincing account of reduplicative phenomena has been a longstanding problem for rule-based theories of morphophonology. Many scholars believe that derivational phonology is incapable in principle of analyzing reduplication. The author of this book demonstrates the adequacy of rule-based theories by providing a general account within that framework and illustrating his proposal with extensive examples of widely varying reduplication schemes from many languages. His analysis is based on new proposals about the structure of autosegmental representations. Although the author offers many new ideas about the computations that are put to use in reduplicative phonology, some fairly radical, his intent is conservative: to provide evidence that the model of the phonological computation developed by Chomsky and Halle in 1968 is fundamentally correct—that surface forms are produced by the successive modification of underlying forms. His theory accounts for the surface properties of reduplicative morphemes by operations that are distributed at various points in the morphophonology rather than by a single operation applied at a single point. Lexical insertion, prosodic adjustment, and copying can each make a contribution to the output at different points in the computation of surface form. The author discusses particular reduplicative processes in many languages as he develops his general theory. The final chapter provides an extensive sequence of detailed case studies. Appendixes offer additional material on the No Crossing Constraint, the autosegmental structure of reduplicative representations, linearization, and concatenative versus nonconcatenative morphology.

Jean-Roger Vergnaud’s work on the foundational issues in linguistics has proved influential over the past three decades. At MIT in 1974, Vergnaud (now holder of the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in Humanities at the University of Southern California) made a proposal in his PhD thesis that has since become, in somewhat modified form, the standard analysis for the derivation of relative clauses. He later integrated the proposal within a broader theory of movement and abstract case. These topics have remained central to theoretical linguistics. This book attests to the importance of Vergnaud’s contributions to linguistics. The chapters first discuss issues in syntax, documenting important breakthroughs in the development of the principles and parameters framework and including a famous letter (unpublished until recently) from Vergnaud to Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik commenting on the first draft of their 1977 paper “Filters and Controls.” Vergnaud’s writings on phonology (which, the editors write, “take a definite syntactic turn”) have also been influential, and the book concludes with two contributions to that field. The chapters, rewarding from both theoretical and empirical perspectives, not only offer insight into Vergnaud’s impact on the field but also describe current work on the issues he introduced into the scholarly debate.

Personal reference, one of the simplest functions of human language, presents linguistic theory with one of its most basic problems: what is the range of possible person systems, and why? Impossible Persons offers an innovative and parsimonious solution to this problem and, in the process, formulates a fresh understanding of what features are in linguistic theory. Shifting the empirical focus away from syncretism towards more abstract partitions, the book shows that person and spatial deixis alike exploit the same small number of partitions, with a much greater number unattested in both domains. The challenge posed by this new empirical insight is met by positing just two features, which generate all and only the attested partitions without recourse to extrinsic constraints. To create this exact generative capacity, Impossible Persons refutes the standard view that features denote first order predicate. Instead, they and their values denote actions by sets on sets. This change in perspective yields a wide range of robust consequences, including a well saturated typology of morphological compositionality for different persons, a straightforward but novel view of how person and number interact in the syntax and semantics, a basis for the nexus between person and spatial deixis, and an understanding of the primitives of thought that ramifies beyond linguistics into more general cognitive scientific concerns.

In his foundational book published in 1995, the author offered a significant contribution to the generative tradition in linguistics. This twentieth-anniversary edition reissues this classic work with a new preface by the author. The author attempts to situate linguistic theory in the broader cognitive sciences, with the chapters formulating and progressively developing the minimalist approach to linguistic theory. Building on the theory of principles and parameters and, in particular, on principles of economy of derivation and representation, the minimalist framework takes Universal Grammar as providing a unique computational system, with derivations driven by morphological properties, to which the syntactic variation of languages is also restricted. Within this theoretical framework, linguistic expressions are generated by optimally efficient derivations that must satisfy the conditions that hold on interface levels, the only levels of linguistic representation. The interface levels provide instructions to two types of performance systems, articulatory-perceptual and conceptual-intentional. All syntactic conditions, then, express properties of these interface levels, reflecting the interpretive requirements of language and keeping to very restricted conceptual resources. In the preface to this edition, the author emphasizes that the minimalist approach developed in the book and in subsequent work “is a program, not a theory.” With this book, the author has built on pursuits from the earliest days of generative grammar to formulate a new research program that had far-reaching implications for the field.

This book develops a theory of control whose central tenet is that control complements divide into two major types: One establishes control by logophoric anchoring, the other by predication. The distinction is keyed to the semantics of the control predicate – whether it is an attitude predicate or not – but it is also syntactically reflected in the structure of the left periphery of the complement clause. Logophoric complements are constructed as a second tier above predicative complements; in both, PRO figures as a minimal, featureless pronoun, which functions as a λ‎-abstractor upon movement. The theory derives the obligatory de se reading of PRO as a as a special kind of de re attitude without ascribing any inherent feature to PRO. At the same time, it provides a principled explanation, based on feature transmission, for the agreement properties of PRO, which are stipulated on competing semantic accounts. Importantly, it is capable of deriving a striking universal asymmetry between obligatory control in attitude and non-attitude contexts: the fact that agreement on the embedded verb blocks the former but not the latter. Further interactions with implicit arguments, control shift and other phenomena find a natural account within the theory. This book is unique in being firmly grounded both in the fomal semantic and the syntactic studies of control. It offers an integrated view that will equally appeal to scholars of either persuasion. By bringing to bear sophisticated present-day grammatical analyses, it offers new insights into the classical problems of control theory.

We are born crying, but those cries signal the first stirring of language. Within a year or so, infants master the sound system of their language; a few years after that, they are engaging in conversations. This remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire any human language—“the language faculty”—raises important biological questions about language, including how it has evolved. This book addresses the enduring question of the evolution of language. It explains that until recently the evolutionary question could not be properly posed, because we did not have a clear idea of how to define “language” and therefore what it was that had evolved. But since the Minimalist Program, developed by Noam Chomsky and others, we know the key ingredients of language and can put together an account of the evolution of human language and what distinguishes us from all other animals. The book discusses the biolinguistic perspective on language, which views language as a particular object of the biological world; the computational efficiency of language as a system of thought and understanding; the tension between Charles Darwin's idea of gradual change and our contemporary understanding about evolutionary change and language; and evidence from nonhuman animals, in particular vocal learning in songbirds.