Volume 3
2002
The co-editors of the three volume are
Stéphanie
Dürrleman and Christopher Laenzlinger.
Jacques Moeschler
Economy and Pragmatic Optimality : The Case of Directional Inferences…….....................1
Jan-Wouter Zwart
The Antisymmetry of Turkish………...........................................................................................23
Léna
Baunaz
On Scandinavian PF-Verb Movement.........................................................................................37
A Feature-Based Theory of Adverb Syntax..................................................................................67
Floating quantifiers: what they can tell us about the syntax and semantics of quantifiers......107
On Scandinavian PF-verb
Movement
Léna Baunaz (lena.baunaz@lettres.unige.ch)
This paper is an attempt to explain the V2 phenomenon in Scandinavian and to localise the position(s) of the finite verb that is fronted in a linear second position. Traditional analyses of V2 describe the phenomenon as involving two parts: a good theory of V2 must account for (i) the presence of an XP in first position and (ii) simultaneous V-movement to the highest head position of the clause. As for (i), I adopt Rizzi's 1997 Split-CP and propose that fronted XPs in Scandinavian target positions in the left periphery. Each targeted position is syntactically determined by both interpretation and intonation: they can refer to what is talked about (Predicative Subjects), Topics or Foci. Concerning (ii) I claim that V-movement in Scandinavian is twofold: syntactic and phonological. The syntactic movement of the finite verb in Scandinavian is to Fin° (following Haegeman 1996 and much recent works), a position where the finite verb can check a strong D-feature (see Chomsky 1995). Syntactic movement is constrained by feature checking of [-Interpretable] features before Spell-out, as it is assumed in Chomsky 1995. The phonological V-movement is to any position adjacent to the fronted XP, leading to the V2 constraint: it pied-pipes only phonological features, leaving in Fin° the categorial feature [V]. Phonological movement is toward the highest head position of the structure, namely either Top°, Foc° or Fin°. This idea leads to assume that the V2 phenomenon is partly a PF constraint
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ECONOMY AND PRAGMATIC OPTIONALITY : the case of directional inferences
Jacques Moeschler (Jacques.Moeschler@lettres.unige.ch)
This paper is
about economy and optimality in language use. Following relevance theory, it is
argued that utterance interpretation is geared by the principle of relevance,
which allows the addressee to presume the optimal relevance of the speaker’s
utterance. The data examined are concerned with temporal inferences, either
triggered by linguistic items (tenses, predicates, connectives) or by accessible
contextual information. We argue that relevance is not only governed by economy
(the less cognitive effort, the more relevance), but also by optimality (avoid
contradiction in encoding temporal information).
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a
Feature-Based Theory of Adverb
Syntax
Christopher Laenzlinger (Christopher.Laenzlinger@lettres.unige.ch)
This paper is
a comparative study of adverb distribution in Romance (mainly French) and
Germanic (mainly German and English) following the feature-based theory of
adverb syntax. Adverbs
are analyzed as unique specifiers of semantically related functional projections
(basically MoodP > ModP < TP < AspP). The hierarchy of clause-internal
functional projections dictates the hierarchy of co-occurrences of adverbs. I
will show the feature-based theory of adverb licensing
is able to handle the problem of adverb order variation. The various positions
of (some) adverbs will be explained by (i) distinct positions for adverb merger
and (ii) different locations for verb (projection) movement and object
scrambling. French and German are assigned the same core of functional
projections within the clause structure, and are subject
to the same set of transformations. Verb movement will be analyzed as an
instance of remnant/pied-piping VP-movement to the specifier of an
inflectional/auxiliary projection (InflP/AuxP). French and German also share the
property of argument scrambling, the subject to Spec-SubjP and the objects to
specifiers of ObjP. The two languages differ in (i) the range of positions for
AuxP/InflP and ObjP (high scrambling for German and low scrambling for French)
and (ii) Infl/Aux movement to Subj (in French) and to C (V2 in German).
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Floating
quantifiers: what they can tell us about the syntax and semantics of quantifiers
Genoveva Puskas (Genoveva.Puskas@lettres.unige.ch)
Jan-Wouter Zwart (C.J.W.Zwart@let.rug.nl)
This paper discusses the question to
what extent Turkish can be analyzed as a head-initial language. It focuses on
the position of backgrounded postverbal material, in response to Kural (1997),
and on inflectional (agglutinative) morphology. It is argued that backgrounded
material invariably takes wide scope, so that the scope properties of postverbal
material in Turkish do not necessarily reflect their residing in a high
specifier position to the right. A large segment of the inflectional morphology
is argued to involve XP-movement rather than head-movement, voiding much of the
argumentation for head final functional projections in Turkish.
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