Tai ngay!!! Ban co the xoa dong chu Mapping the Left Periphery This page intentionally left blank Mapping the Left Periphery The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 5 Edited by Paola Benincà and Nicola Munaro 2010 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2010 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-19-974037-6 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-19-974036-9 (pbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper We dedicate this book to Noam Chomsky, on the thirtieth anniversary of the “Pisa Lectures.” This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Introduction 3 Paola Benincà and Nicola Munaro Part I: The Projections in CP 1. Assertive Bien in Spanish and the Left Periphery 19 M. On the Syntax of Topic and Focus in Chinese 63 Linda Badan and Francesca Del Gobbo 3.
What’s a Wh-Word Got to Do with It? 91 Enoch O. Aboh and Roland Pfau 4. Toward a Hierarchy of Clause Types 125 Nicola Munaro 5. The Structure of the Topic Field in Hungarian 163 Anikó Lipták Part II : At the Borders of CP 6.
Sentential Particles and Remnant Movement 201 Cecilia Poletto and Raffaella Zanuttini 7. Matching Moods: Mood Concord between CP and IP in Salentino and Southern Calabrian Subjunctive Complements 228 Federico Damonte viii CONTENTS 8. Subject Licensing in CP: The Neapolitan Double-Subject Construction 257 Adam Ledgeway 9. Evidential Mood, Restructuring, and the Distribution of Functional Sembrare 297 Liliane Haegeman Person Index 327 Language Index 333 Subject Index 335 Mapping the Left Periphery This page intentionally left blank PAOLA BENINCÀ AND NICOLA MUNARO Introduction 1.
On grammatical description This reader follows other volumes of the Cartographic series, which contain some of the results of the cartography of syntactic structure; this research project aims at establishing a systematic matching between morphosyntactic and semantic features and functional projections, in other words at drawing “maps as precise and detailed as possible of syntactic configurations” (Cinque and Rizzi 2008, 43). The present volume is specifically dedicated to the fine structure of CP, the left-periphery of sentence structure, including the areas at its borders, whose properties and relations with the rest of sentential structure are still hazy and poorly described. We have invited the contributors to adopt or discuss the basic outline of the fine structure of CP sketched in Rizzi (1997), together with the revisions argued for in Benincà (2001) and further developed in Benincà and Poletto (2004). We thank Guglielmo Cinque, Federico Damonte, Terje Lohndal, Mair M.
Parry, Christina Tortora, and Raffaella Zanuttini, for having read this introduction and discussed various points with us in a very fruitful way. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers, who pointed out weaknesses and obscurities; we are particularly grateful to one anonymous reviewer who made observations that substantially improved and enriched the text. We also thank the colleagues who helped us reading and commenting on the chap- ters before we presented the volume to the publisher: Guglielmo Cinque, Francesca Del Gobbo, Cecilia Poletto, and Laura Sgarioto. For the concerns of the Italian academy, Paola Benincà takes responsibility over section 1 of this introduction, and Nicola Munaro over section 2.
3 4 MAPPING THE LEFT PERIPHERY Our work is primarily inspired by the belief that careful descriptions survive quite a long time and—directly or indirectly—bear on the possible solutions that a formal theory can propose. In this introduction we offer some reflections that we hope will make our position within the cartographic framework more explicit; we also implicitly respond to some criticisms that our assumptions and results have aroused. As Chomsky says in “Minimalist Inquiries” (Chomsky 2000; hereafter MI), Minimalism is a program, not a theory; there are no minimalist answers, only mini- malist questions. The aim of the present volume is to pose some questions, minimal- ist in spirit, despite appearances to the contrary.
We start from the question concerning the role and usefulness of grammatical description. When the minimalist style developed in the early 1990s, the time was ripe for an assessment of several decades of research and for a review of some general theoretical questions, which had not been considered central within the extremely productive Principles and Parameters framework. The time had come to refine the theory and give it a more restrictive frame, to find a formal level that could reach explanatory adequacy with respect to what had been described in terms of Principles and Parameters, and often explained through what Chomsky termed “engineering solutions.” As appears more clearly in MI than in other works by Chomsky in the last decade, this did not mean that the time for grammatical description was over, that what we knew of grammars or Grammar at that point was everything that was worth knowing at a descriptive level. Chomsky in MI does say that (p.
93) “perhaps the elimination of descriptive technology yields empirical results that are as good as, or perhaps better than, before,” but he also says (p. 92) that perhaps the minimalist program “makes sense but is premature.” Why should that be the case? It is always time to check the appropriateness of one’s tools, try- ing to make them simpler and more effective; doing so is premature only if it leads us to throw away our screwdriver before we have designed a new instrument for driving screws. We can continue using our tools as long as they allow us to high- light some new features of grammars that are real phenomena, at some level of abstraction. It sometimes appears that the Minimalist Program and the Cartographic Project represent diverging views of Grammar.
As has been already discussed,1 among the most controversial aspects of the Cartographic Project is the fact that it conceives of the functional structure of the clause as a very complex and detailed pre-existing object, consisting of a very large number of heads, ordered among each other and spe- cialized in their function.2 Moreover, at least some of the researchers that participate in 1. See, in particular, Cinque (1999, §6.2) and the introductions to Cinque (2002), Belletti (2004), and Rizzi (2004); also see Chomsky (2005a, 123–124; 2008, fn. 18 and relative text). It is often suggested, for example (even by an anonymous reviewer of this volume, among many others), to avoid “‘prefab’ structures, by assigning rigid selectional restrictions to every functional category in the lexicon (‘X selects Y and only Y’).” This hardly appears to be an interesting alternative, but it is a stipulation that requires explanation in some way; in the carto- graphic framework, a preexisting structure with a given order of functional projections—the INTRODUCTION 5 the Cartographic Project share the assumption that this very rich and detailed struc- ture is a permanent part of Universal Grammar (UG).
This seems to go in a direction that is not consistent with the minimalist view, according to which grammar is a perfect engine, where nothing is superfluous and various kinds of principles of min- imal effort are frequently appealed to. Admittedly, a series of heads, yet to be deter- mined in number and expressing minimal differences, may seem decidedly redundant (as has been observed, e., with respect to the modal and aspectual projections proposed in Cinque 1999). Yet, redundancy has been traditionally observed in grammar, but we believe that this redundancy is only apparent, pre- theoretical. If we take biology, for example, we see that surrogate elements in many cases ensure the survival of injured bodies, as an effect of a sort of redundancy of the living organisms.
Organisms, though, are not built as they are in order to be equipped to supply spare parts when necessary; they simply are very rich and sophisticated, and if something is damaged, the whole of the organism in many cases makes up for the malfunctioning of a sub-part. For example, we do not have two hands in order to have a spare one if one of them is injured—hands are two for very complex, inde- pendent reasons; yet, if one of them does not work, we are able to manage and learn how to use the other and partly offset the functions of the lost one, as is the case for a spare tire. Languages also, when observed naively, seem to manifest many sorts of appar- ent redundancy. For example, we see that some languages have verbal endings that identify the subject of the verb, such as Italian and Spanish; some have practically no endings, but subject pronouns or noun phrases that play the same role, such as Eng- lish or Chinese; and many have both, such as German, French, and Paduan.
Tradi- tionally, this last case has been described in terms of redundancy. Similarly, some languages have empty categories corresponding to a dislocated element, while some have clitics resuming and identifying it; this latter case, too, is traditionally consid- ered an example of redundancy. We claim that such apparent duplications are not redundancies. If we assume that all grammars are the same, the apparent redundancy consists in the fact that the functional apparatus of Grammar is richer than meets the eye, and not all of its parts have to be made visible on the surface in every language.
Then, what is visible in one language must be present but invisible in another. Redundancy indicates that where a language shows, for example, only one functional element, while another has two, Grammar has at least two; furthermore, if for the same func- tion one language uses one kind of element and another uses an element of a different nature (e. autonomous pronouns or particles), and a third language has neither, we have to conclude that this one function has to be split into more product, partly accidental, of evolution—frees us from the task of accounting for the order. On the other hand, as supportively commented by the other anonymous reviewer, the apparent complexity of syntactic structure that cartography leads to “is only apparent: the complexity results from the recursive application of merge to members of F.” One gets the impression that the discussion about structure, the “perfect engine,” the “third factor” (see Chomsky 2005b), is not about how language faculty is shaped but about the evolution that led to its actual form.
6 MAPPING THE LEFT PERIPHERY abstract subparts, each of which may be made visible on the surface, by filling it with phonological material, or which may be left empty and invisible.3 To go deeper into the issue of the apparent tension between “perfection”4 and redundancy, let us reflect on another passage of MI (statement 3), where language is defined as “an optimal solution to legibility conditions,” (p. 97) in the sense that “the objects it generates are legible.” Using the “evolutionary fable” that Chomsky (MI) invented, we can say that language is first of all a system that reads, and the objects it reads are the pre-linguistic mental symbols of the “language of thoughts”; let us call them “objects of thought.” Language is a system that makes these objects legi- ble, a system that permits encoding and decoding of thoughts, that is, a mental repre- sentation of reality such that it can be thought and it can be said.