Microparametric Syntax and Dialect Variation

288 Pages·1996·25.17 MB·English

by  James R. Black

MICROPARAMETRIC SYNTAX AND DIALECT VARIATION
AMSTERDAM STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND
HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE
General Editor
E.F. KONRAD KOERNER
(University of Ottawa)
Series IV - CURRENT ISSUES IN LINGUISTIC THEORY
Advisory Editorial Board
Henning Andersen (Los Angeles); Raimo Anttila (Los Angeles)
Thomas V. Gamkrelidze (Tbilisi); John E. Joseph (Kong Kong)
Hans-Heinrich Lieb (Berlin); Ernst Pulgram (Ann Arbor, Mich.)
E. Wyn Roberts (Vancouver, B.C.); Danny Steinberg (Tokyo)
Volume 139
James R. Black and Virginia Motapanyane (eds)
Microparametric Syntax and Dialect Variation
MICROPARAMETRIC SYNTAX
AND DIALECT VARIATION
Edited by
JAMES R. BLACK
Memorial University of Newfoundland
VIRGINIA MOTAPANYANE
University of New Brunswick
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Microparametric syntax and dialect variation / edited by James R. Black and Virginia
Motapanyane.
p. cm. - (Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series
IV, Current issues in linguistic theory, ISSN 0304-0763 ; v. 139)
Includes one contribution in French.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: Microparametric syntax : some introductory remarks / Richard S. Kayne - Une
analyse microparamétrique des moyens dans les langues romanes / J.-Marc Authier & Lisa
Reed - Treating that-trace variation / Philip Branigan - Negative particle questions / Lisa L.-
S. Cheng, C-T. James Huang & C.-C. Jane Tang - Imperative inversion in Belfast English /
Alison Henry - Scandinavian possessive constructions from a northern Swedish viewpoint /
Anders Holmberg & Görel Sandström - The occasional absence of anaphoric agreement in
Labrador Inuttut / Alana Johns - Hypothetical infinitives and crosslinguistic variations in
continental and Quebec French / France Martineau & Virginia Motapanyane - The second
person singular interrogative in the traditional vernacular of the Bolton metropolitan area /
Graham Shorrocks - Reflexives, pronouns, and subject/verb agreement in Icelandic and
Faroese / Knut Taraid Taraldsen - Adverbial quantifiers and dialectal variation in a
minimalist framework I Marie-Thérèse Vinet - Verb clusters in continental West Germanic
dialects / Jan-Wouter Zwart.
1. Grammar, Comparative and general—Syntax. 2. Language and languages-Variation. 3.
Linguistic geography. I. Black, James R. II. Motapanyane, Virginia. III. Series.
P291.M49 1996
415--dc20 96-38230
ISBN 90 272 3643 7 (Eur.) / 1-55619-594-X (US) (alk. paper) CIP
© Copyright 1996 - John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O.Box 75577 · 1070 AN Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O.Box 27519 · Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 · USA
CONTENTS
Richard S. Kayne
Microparametric Syntax: Some Introductory Remarks ix
Jean-Marc Authier & Lisa Reed
Une analyse microparamétrique des moyens
dans les langues romanes 1
Philip Branigan
Tracing that-trace Variation 25
Lisa Cheng, James Huang & Jane Tang
Negative Particle Questions: A Dialectal Comparison 41
Alison Henry
Imperative Inversion in Belfast English 79
Anders Holmberg & Görel Sandström
Scandinavian Possessive Constructions from a
Northern Swedish Viewpoint 95
Alana Johns
The Anaphoric Agreement Morpheme in Labrador Inuttut 121
France Martineau & Virginia Motapanyane
Hypothetical Infinitives and Crosslinguistic Variation in
Continental and Québec French 145
Graham Shorrocks
The Second Person Singular Interrogative in the
Traditional Vernacular of the Bolton Metropolitan Area 169
Knut Taraid Taraldsen
Reflexives, Pronouns and Subject/V Agreement in
Icelandic and Faroese 189
Marie-Thérèse Vinet
Adverbial Quantifiers and Dialectal Variation in a
Minimalist Framework 213
Jan-Wouter Zwart
Verb Clusters in Continental West Germanic Dialects 229
General Index 259

PREFATORY NOTE
The papers in this volume originated as presentations at the 18th annual
meeting of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association, held 28-29 October
1994 in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada.
Selected papers on the conference theme of Microparametric Syntax and
Dialect Variation were subsequently refereed and revised in light of reviewers'
comments.
The editors gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the University
of New Brunswick - Saint John and of the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada for providing grants towards the costs of the con­
ference and the publication of papers.
We also acknowledge with gratitude the help so freely and generously of­
fered by linguists asked to comment on these papers: without their thorough and
conscientious assistance, this enterprise would have been impossible. Special
thanks as well to Janis Black for careful proofreading and many helpful sugges­
tions.
JAMES R. BLACK
Department of Linguistics
Memorial University of Newfoundland
St. John's, NF, Al 3X9, Canada
VIRGINIA MOTAPANYANE
Humanities
University of New Brunswick - Saint John
Saint John, NB, E2L 4L5, Canada
June 1996

MICROPARAMETRIC SYNTAX:
SOME INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
RICHARD S. KAYNE
Graduate Center, City University of New York
Comparative syntax can be thought of as that facet of syntactic theory di­
rectly concerned with the question of how best to characterize the properties of
human languages that are not universal. Put another way, comparative syntax di­
rectly addresses the question of how best to understand the notion of parameter
taken to underlie syntactic variation.
The study of differences among languages must obviously proceed in tan­
dem with the study of what they have in common, i.e., with the study of the
principles of Universal Grammar (UG) that interact with language specific pa­
rameters to yield observed variation. Similarly, there is every reason to believe
that the search for universal syntactic principles cannot proceed without close
attention being paid to syntactic variation.
At its most successful, comparative syntax simultaneously achieves two
primary kinds of results: it accounts for observed clusterings of syntactic pro­
perties by showing that the several properties in question can all be traced back
to a single relatively more abstract parameter setting. And it shows that that op­
timal parametric account depends on particular assumptions about the proper
formulation or understanding of the principles of universal grammar. In the latter
way, comparative syntax provides evidence bearing on questions which are not
themselves comparative in nature.
My own work in comparative syntax was at first limited to problems arising
from a comparison of French and English. I argued, for example, that the ab­
sence in French of the so-called Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) construction
{John considers Bill to have been mistaken) need not, as Chomsky had thought,
be seen as an irreducible difference between the two languages.1 Rather, that
French-English difference should be related to others involving prepositions and
lCf. Chomsky (1980, 1981) and Kayne (1981).