The role of bundled heads in cross-linguistic variation in clause structure: Evidence from verb-second effects
Past Event
Thursday, November 17, 2016 7:30 PM to 8:30 PM EST
Merten Hall, #3300
What are the discourse and semantic features that languages express through clause structure, and how can languages vary in how they are realized? Recent syntactic research has produced substantial evidence that the left edge of the clause contains a series of functional projections that encode a range of clause type and discourse features. However, this raises new problems in accounting for languages that make restricted use of the proposed universal structure. This talk focuses on current issues in the analysis of "relaxed" verb-second languages, in which verb-third and verb-fourth orders are possible, and argues for the following parameter in syntactic variation: Languages vary in whether individual functional features are realized on separate heads, or on individual heads that contain "bundles" of features. This allows a straightforward account for the typology of verb-second effects, and a new explanation for general cross-linguistic variation in clause structure.
Hosted by GMU Linguistics Society.
Sponsored by Linguistics Program.
