The Linguistics Colloquium this Friday November 22nd will be given by Gary Thoms (NYU). Time and place: 3.30pm in ILC S211. Title and abstract below.
Counter-counter-cyclicity
One of the best ideas in Chomsky’s Minimalist critique was the proposal that structure building proceeds monotonically, captured via his Extension Condition. Somewhat unfortunately, it has become increasingly common for syntactic analysis to reject this proposal on empirical grounds and to allow a range of counter-cyclic derivations to capture a range of phenomena which seem to resist cyclic treatments given standard base representations. In this talk I argue against counter-cyclic derivations by means of a series of case studies — the ‘punting’ of interveners, ‘skipping’ derivations, late merge of adjuncts, and ‘tucking in’ in multiple wh-questions — and I argue that counter-cyclic proposals fail to capture the facts. I argue that multidominant representations (of the kind championed by Kyle Johnson) give us a means by which to capture these phenomena more effectively, with a particularly important role for rethinking the specifics of our base structures.
