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Syntax
| Michal Starke |
| Peter Svenonius |
| Tarald Taraldsen |
Much of formal syntax can productively be divided into four domains: The CP domain (wherein discourse-related notions such as topic, focus, declarative vs. interrogative force, and so on are pertinent), the IP domain (locus of tense and the most prominent subject properties but also licensing relations such as case and agreement), the VP domain (argument structure and Aktionsart, notions heavily influenced by matters of lexical semantics), and DP structure (in some ways a microcosm of the clause). One subproject will examine each of these different realms in light of recent developments in the expansion of the inventory of functional categories, the semantic basis for many of these categories, and the abstract nature of movement (e.g. remnant movement, PF movement, Remerge).
We will investigate the properties of formal licensing (case and agreement), including the location of the licensing features (or heads) within the hierarchy of functional categories. Likewise, we would like to undertake a systematic cross-linguistic investigation of clause union phenomena, drawing on recent developments primarily based on Germanic and Romance data. This undertaking presupposes an understanding of how the semantics of different types of adverbs (e.g., directional vs locative, scopal properties, etc.) contributes to determining their external distribution, and of how the external distribution of different DP types correlates with their internal structure. Another central issue concerns the existence of mirror principle effects: Does the morphosyntax of natural language consistently conform to the mirror principle? If so, what is the best way of incorporating the mirror principle (or its effects) into syntactic theory ?
Interesting questions arise both concerning the (non-)local character of syntactic movement as well as the interaction between different types of movement. The latter question borders on another one, regarding the architecture of syntactic representations: Are the different clausal domains mentioned above best modeled as layers of a single structural representation, or as independent levels of representation? Conceivably, most of our research efforts will end up focusing on just two or three syntactic domains. Our strategy will be to select research topics that seem both inherently interesting and tractable, given the manpower at our disposal at any given time. In keeping with CASTLÕs general research program, we will favor research aiming at uncovering and explaining cross-linguistic correlations between syntactic properties.
SUBPROJECTS
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