Ling N: Cartography and its Consequences (advanced!)
Adam Szczegielniak (University of Gdansk)
John Frederick Bailyn (Stony Brook University)
Cartography and its consequences
The course provides a critical overview of cartographic approaches in syntax, whose assumptions can be summarized as:
- Uniformity of projections. Functional heads, much like contentive heads, give rise to full fledged phrasal projections.
- The functional lexicon and the triggering of syntactic actions. Functional heads endowed with the appropriate morphosyntactic features trigger syntactic movement, and possibly other major syntactic actions.
- The functional lexicon as the locus of syntactic variation. Parameters of syntactic variation are encoded as morphosyntactic features in the functional heads.
- The complexity of functional structures and the cartography of syntax. Contentive projections are accompanied in syntactic representations by rich zones consisting of sequences of functional projections, which are charted in cartographic studies. (Rizzi and Guglielmo Cinque 2016 ‘Functional Categories and Syntactic Theory’. The Annual Review of Linguistics 2:139–63.)
We explore major cartography research in Romance, Germanic, English and Slavic, focusing on the structure of the CP, IP and DP. Special emphasis is put on movement and information structure in the CP/IP domain, as well as the structure of nominal modification. The course requires knowledge of syntax at the intro level, but no prior knowledge of cartography is required.
The course provides a critical overview of cartographic approaches in syntax, whose assumptions can be summarized as:
- Uniformity of projections. Functional heads, much like contentive heads, give rise to full fledged phrasal projections.
- The functional lexicon and the triggering of syntactic actions. Functional heads endowed with the appropriate morphosyntactic features trigger syntactic movement, and possibly other major syntactic actions.
- The functional lexicon as the locus of syntactic variation. Parameters of syntactic variation are encoded as morphosyntactic features in the functional heads.
- The complexity of functional structures and the cartography of syntax. Contentive projections are accompanied in syntactic representations by rich zones consisting of sequences of functional projections, which are charted in cartographic studies. (Rizzi and Guglielmo Cinque 2016 ‘Functional Categories and Syntactic Theory’. The Annual Review of Linguistics 2:139–63.)
We explore major cartography research in Romance, Germanic, English and Slavic, focusing on the structure of the CP, IP and DP. Special emphasis is put on movement and information structure in the CP/IP domain, as well as the structure of nominal modification. The course requires knowledge of syntax at the intro level, but no prior knowledge of cartography is required.