Teamleader:
Michal Starke

Other Team members:
Luisa Marti
Peter Svenonius
Kristine Bentzen

Time span:
Project starts:
01.09.2004

Project ends:
31.12.2005

Brief description and goals:
A core component of the Received View of Language is that syntax is a system which groups pre-packaged lexical units. This picture is implicit in the textbook description of syntax as "the study of word order": words are the pre-packaged units, and the task of syntax is to order them. The same assumption is made explicit in the classical generative slogan that 'syntax projects from the lexicon': syntax takes lexical entries as input, and expands them into trees. After syntax has grouped them, these units are "spelled out", obtaining a linear order.

There is some amount of debate about the "size" of these pre-packaged lexical units: they are sometimes taken to be "words" (lexicalism), and sometimes "morphemes". There is however no debate about the general picture: everybody agrees that there are some such prepackaged units, and syntax is merely a grouping mechanism operating on them. This conscensus cuts across the many variants of generative grammar, and extends to structuralism and traditional "descriptivist" grammarians. It is indeed one of the very few assumptions that has remained virtually unquestionned for centuries.

Much recent research however suggests that it is wrong. It is in fact increasingly looking like the phlogiston of linguistics - a historical embarrasment. A wide array of recent work points to the direction that the atoms of syntax are much smaller than words or morphemes. From that it immediately follows that syntax is not merely an "arranger of preconstructed units". Rather, it both builds the units and arranges them into larger syntagms.

If correct, this seemingly simple change of perspective has radical consequences. In fact, this is possibly one of the two most important breaks with the whole grammatical tradition (the other break being the view of language as a set of principles and parameters rather than a set of rules - often emphasised as being more important than the
'break' into generative grammar).

For want of a better term, let us temporarily call this the atomist view: the primitives of syntax are an order of magnitude smaller than the smallest "surface units" (morphemes), very much like atoms are an order of magnitude smaller than the smallest aggregate unit (molecules).

Three types of questions arise immediately: (i) what are the
primitives of syntax and what is the correct decomposition of surface morphemes/words into these primitives? (ii) how are the surface morphemes/words created from the primitive? what are the "morpheme forming" syntactic operations? (iii) what is the spellout procedure such that entire subtrees are interpreted as a single spellout unit?

These questions immediately lead to a questioning of many traditional assumptions. Take for instance the core building blocks of syntax: Nouns, Verbs, etc. These are typically taken to be primitives, or quasi-primitives expressed by a shallow set of features (Chomsky 72, Baker 2003). Under the current approach, the come out as internally complex structures, derived entities rather than primitive terminals. If so, what are they made of? Which primitives take on the role that is usually assigned to them (argument structure, heading extended projections, selection, etc.) How are they put together? How are they spelled out? What becomes of verb/noun-movement, etc.

As a first step, we will try remain around issues surrounding verbs and their decomposition, in order to maintain a close contact with the other two research groups: the decomposition of the VP maps directly into argument structure and the functional structure of the VP, and under the 'peeling' assumption, it also interacts directly with the high structure of nominals.

Some concrete issues that arise in this context and which are ongoing research projects to various degrees, are:

• the syntax of '-able' with an argument that '-able' is a morpheme which spells out an entire subtree rather than a single terminal. This extends to the syntax of middles and passive affixes.



• more generally, a view on how to analyse derivational morphology in syntax. A topic that is implied by many approaches but not followed up on.



• the adjectival nature of (passive) participles, and hence the surprising fact that the VP is sometimes headed by what looks like an adjective.



• more generally asymmetries between major categories (N,V,Adj,etc.) that are left unaccounted for in the Received View, in particular the massive Noun/Verb asymmetries.



• peeling and its consequence that a verb is nothing more than the spellout of the "thematic peels"



• peeling in its interaction with the growth and shrinking of the 'molecules'



• if morphemes are not primitives, a lot of the labelling work looks like pie-piping and hence a core part of phrase-structure needs to be looked at more closely.



• idioms. Saying that a morpheme as a spellout of a tree comes close to saying that that morphoeme is an idiom. Hence a theory of how morphemes are spelled out from the complex syntactic tree should go hand in hand with a theory of how idioms are read off such trees.

Activities planned for the project:
- a series of theory oriented workshops (miniTilts)
- morphology of able/passives meeting