Title
A minimalist perspective on typology

Jan-Wouter Zwart (Groningen)

Date:  02.02.2006

Time:  19:15

Venue:  E010 1

This paper discusses the notion of dependency marking, and argues that the traditional distinction between head-marking and dependent-marking should be recast as a distinction between dependent-marking and nondependent-marking. Current thinking on dependency in the typological literature is an outgrowth of traditional structuralist Dependency Theory, where the head of a phrase takes all nonheads within that phrase as dependents. Dependency relations, then, are head-nonhead relations, which may be marked on the head (head-marking) or the non-head (dependent-marking). The derivational approach to syntactic relations, a key concept within minimalist thinking, restricts grammatical relations to elements that are joined directly by the operation Merge, i.e. to sisters. This leads to the question how dependency marking is distributed among members of sister pairs. This paper shows that whereas the earlier dichotomy yielded a more or less even distribution of head-marking and dependent-marking among the languages of the world (with perhaps a slight preference for head-marking), the new dichotomy suggests a very strong preference for dependent-marking over nondependent-marking. We discuss the causes of the difference between the two typological generalizations, prominent among which is that many cases of head-marking are in fact cases of dependent-marking in disguise. The paper leads to the conclusion that linguistic variation in the domain under discussion is not the function of a head vs. dependent-marking parameter,but is to be described in terms of the ways languages may realize dependency on one or more terms of the dependent category.