The Parametrization of Universal Grammar

250 Pages·1993·21.551 MB·English

by  Gisbert Fanselow

THE PARAMETRIZATION OF UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
LINGUISTIK AKTUELL
This series provides a platform for studies in the syntax,
semantics, and pragmatics of the Germanic languages
and their historical developments.
The focus of the series is represented by its German title
Linguistik Aktuell (Linguistics Today).
Texts in the series are in English.
Series Editor
Werner Abraham
Germanistisch Instituut
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Oude Kijk in 't Jatstraat 26
9712 EK Groningen
The Netherlands
Advisory Editorial Board
Hans den Besten, University of Amsterdam
Guglielmo Cinque, University of Venice
Günther Grewendorf, J. W. Goethe-University, Frankfurt
Hubert Haider, University of Stuttgart
Lars Hellan, University of Trondheim
Christer Platzack, University of Lund
Ken Safir, State University of New Jersey
Lisa deMena Travis, McGill University
Volume 8
Gisbert Fanselow (ed.)
The Parametrization of Universal Grammar
THE PARAMETRIZATION
OF
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
Edited by
GISBERT FANSELOW
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
1993
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Parametrization of universal grammar / edited by Gisbert Fanselow.
p. cm. -- (Linguistik aktuell, ISSN 0166-0829 ; v. 8)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Grammar, Comparative and general. 2. Principles and parameters (Linguistics) I.
Fanselow, Gisbert. II. Series: Linguistik aktuell ; Bd. 8.
P151.P32 1993
415-dc20 92-39961
ISBN 90 272 2728 4 (Eur.)/l-55619-226-6 (US) (alk. paper) CIP
© Copyright 1993 - 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 • 821 Bethlehem Pike • Philadelphia, PA 19118 • USA
Table of Contents
Instead of Preface:
Some Reflections on Parameters
Gisbert Fanselow VII
Principled Variability:
Parametrization without Parameter Fixing 1
Hubert Haider
Parameter Setting and the Binding Theory:
No Subset Problem 17
Priya Bondre
Projecting Inflecting Verbs 37
Eric Reuland & Wim Kosmeijer
The Projection of Categories and the Nature
of Agreement 73
Ellen Brandner
The Structure of German Verb Projections -
A Problem of Syntactic Parametrization 123
Peter Suchsland
The Definition of Morphological and Syntactic Words 145
Marco Haverkort
On the Linear Order of the Modifier-Head-Position in NPs 161
Manfred Ewert & Fred Hansen
On the Parametrization of Lexical Properties 183
Elisabeth Löbel
The Syntax of "Possessor" Phrases 201
Ilse Zimmermann

INSTEAD OF A PREFACE:
SOME REFLECTIONS ON PARAMETERS*
Gisbert Fanselow
0. In its popular interpretation, the theory of evolution by natural selection tries
to explain the perfect adaption of living species to the demands of the environment
they live in. One of the recurrent themes in the writings of Stephen Jay Gould is,
however, the attempt to convince us, the laymen, that this is not quite so. A
perfect and optimal adaption to the environment could also be the result of an act
of a benevolent creator, while imperfect, but still functional designs, solutions that
would never come to the mind of a fairly rational engineer, are what you would
expect to be the outcome of natural selection. Gould's description of the panda's
thumb (Gould 1980) is a nice illustration of this point. Natural languages
constitute, of course, a further example of this insight. The argument against a
divine origin of language is just the same: who dares to make Him responsible for,
say, the German language?
Imperfections seem to disappear, though, when we move up one level in the
hierarchy of linguistic analysis, when we turn our attention to the structure of
Universal Grammar. I think it is wise to not attribute the complications in e.g.
current formulations of the ECP, the notion of a barrier, etc., to the structure of
UG, but to consider them rather as reflecting the fact that we have not yet attained
a full understanding of the principles underlying natural language grammars.
Chomsky (1992:1) makes us aware of the curious situation that the study of
natural languages within the generative enterprise, guided by the quest for
elegance, simplicity and the greatest possible degree of generalization, has been
extremely successful in the last 35 years, in spite of the fact that the object of our
studies, UG, is a biological entity, and thus prone to consist of inelegancies,
redundancies, and other unwelcome properties. Given what we know about the
origin of species in general and of our own species in particular, we should not,
however, take this as evidence that UG is godsend. Theories of UG do not
immediately characterize properties of a biological system, rather, they reflect the
structure of an abstract, formal system that comes into being when the linguistic
co-processor of our brains, which we call UG, is confronted with linguistic data.
At least this is the position advocated by Haider1, Koster (1987, 1988) and
Fanselow (1991) (among others), and if it is true, it is no wonder that we can so
VIII GISBERT FANSELOW
successfully try to formulate elegant and general theories of grammar, since their
relation to the biological object we study is only an indirect one.
Nevertheless, the role the principles of UG play under such a conception of
linguistic theory is sufficiently clear. They inform us about the limitations of the
processing capacity of the neural structures underlying the human language
faculty, i.e. they correspond, even if only indirectly, to something which is in our
brains, and in the ideal situation, they will take a form that sheds some albeit
vague light on deeper properties of the processing system. Koster's (1987)
principle of Global Harmony, Rizzi's (1991) Relativized Minimality, Pesetsky's
(1987) nestedness condition, and Chomsky's (1989, 1992) proposals concerning
the economy of derivations and the ordering of rule application are cases in point.
What parameters of UG inform us about, to turn at last to the topic unifying the
contributions to this volume, is much less clear. At first glance, the answer seems
to be quite simple: principles of UG represent language-invariant properties of
grammar, and parameters tell us about the range of potential variation between
grammars. Thus, Principles A and B of the Binding Theory require that anaphors
be bound and pronouns be free in a certain local domain Σ, while parameters
constrain the range of variation for Σ: the choice of Σ in a given language depends
on the presence of a subject and/or properties of functional categories in the Infl-
domain, other conceivable factors simply do not play a role in the grammar of
anaphors (see, e.g., Manzini & Wexler 1987).
1. Closer inspection reveals, however, that this is not necessarily so. At the one
extreme, what we express in terms of a parameter might not reflect a property X
of the language faculty, but rather the absence of such a property. This comes
close to the position in Haider. To give a simple example first, recall that in
certain languages V assigns Case to the right (English, French), while in others, it
assigns Case to the left (Dutch, German); similar variation may be observed for
Infl, N and the other Case-assigning categories (but cf. e.g. Zimmermann). So one
might postulate, as e.g. Fanselow & Felix (1987: 70) have done (to put the blame
on myself), that there is a parameter of UG such as "X governs to the right/to the
left". But it is obvious that this does not reflect any constraints on the processing
capacity of UG: there are no other possibilities left; Case cannot be assigned above
or below V or Infl. To postulate a parameter here is, in a sense, a strange way of
expressing that UG does not regulate the direction of government at all (but see
below). The importance of this example lies in the fact that the directionality of
government has quite a number of far-reaching consequences in other domains of
grammar. As Reuland & Kosmeijer demonstrate, a proper formulation of the
principles governing the relation between various levels of representation, in
particular the one between morphological structure and S-structure, guarantees that
many correlates of the SVO-SOV contrast can be made to follow from statements
SOME REFLECTIONS IX
concerning the direction of government: the existence of V-to-I-movement, the
placement of adverbials, the position of subjects, options for scrambling,
pecularities in the grammar of gerunds/nominal infinitives, etc. Thus, to speak of
a parameter of directionality of Case (or 0-role) assignment is nothing but a
convenient façon de parler, but it is certainly misleading, at least in this case,
since it would suggest that "parameters" themselves might be of any interest,
whereas in reality, the crucial factors are principles such as those proposed by
Reuland & Kosmeijer which guarantee that a number of properties of grammar
will always co-vary. The only thing that would be lost if we eliminate the
directionality parameter is the implication that government by a category X is
always unidirectional (we do not find languages in which verbs assign Case both to
the right and to the left, or in which some verbs govern leftwards and others
rightwards), but this may be promoted to the status of a principle of UG.2
Note that the directionality parameter is by no means exceptional in this
respect. Given that UG does not contain a statement excluding that D assigns
Case, the fact that interesting properties of languages can be related to the
presence or absence of such a Case assignment potentional (see, e.g.,
Zimmermann) does not at all force a reificationist interpretation of a parameter in
this context. Similar considerations apply to those parameters that govern the level
of representation at which certain processes must have applied: if we stick to the
original T-model of the theory of Government and Binding, and if there are
principles guaranteeing that, e.g., wh-phrases must be in [Spec, CP] at LF, or that
V must be adjoined to Infl at this level of representation, then we need not add an
additional statement to the theory of UG expressing that the movement processes
in question may apply between D-structure and S-structure in some languages, and
between S-structure and LF in others: there are, simply, no other options left.
As a final illustration of the point I am trying to make, consider the
parametrization of the Binding Theory as discussed e.g. in Bondre. Early accounts
of the variation we find with respect to the local domain Σ of anaphoric binding
such as Manzini & Wexler (1987) assumed that Σ is not constant across languages:
any IP counts as a barrier for anaphoric binding in e.g. English, while in other
languages, certain types of IPs are transparent: infinitives in Norwegian,
infinitives and subjunctives in Icelandic, and any non-root clause in Japanese or
Chinese. Nowadays, however, there seems to be a growing consensus that
anaphors are always bound locally: the appearance that long distance binding is
licensed in certain languages is either reduced to LF-movement of the anaphor
(cf., e.g., Cole, Hermon & Sung 1990), or to the fact that, one way or the other,
indices of subjects of superordinate clauses are copied into embedded clauses
{Bondre). In the latter kind of approach, which seems to be superior to the former
one (cf., e.g., the discussion in Fanselow 1991), long distance binding of
X GISBERT FANSELOW
anaphors is thus made possible by pecularities of the feature composition of
Infl/Agr-nodes, and if UG neither excludes nor prescribes the pertinent feature
transfer, no parameter in the literal sense of the term can be defined in the realm
of anaphoric binding either.
2. The claim that parameters do not have the same ontological status as the
principles of UG, in that they simply reflect the fact that UG is silent about certain
formal properties that natural languages might have, can be established only if one
demonstrates that all proposed types of parametric variation fit into this picture,
but before we go into this issue a bit more deeply, we should turn to the other
extreme in the spectrum of potential problems with parameters: they seem to
introduce too much expressive power into the theory of grammar, cf., e.g.,
Webelhuth (1989) for this point. Suppose we encounter a language, Hubertese,
with one of the properties discussed in Haider, which is just like English with the
exception of the grammaticality judgements of the following types of sentences
(1= grammatical in English, out in Hubertese; 2 = ungrammatical in English,
perfect in Hubertese).
(la) 1 what do you believe that he bought
(lb) 1 who do you think won the race
(lc) 1 how do you think that he solved the problem
(ld) 2 who think you that won the race
(le) 2 who wonder you what has bought
(1f) 1 how wonder you why who behaves
(2a) 1 1 did not come
(2b) 2 7 came not
Even if you have not yet read Haider's paper, it is easy to see that Hubertese
differs from English in that traces must not be properly governed in the former
language, while the ECP is, of course, obeyed in the latter. Nothing in the
»traditional« version of the GB-approach really excludes such a language, since, if
we were to discover that there are indeed native speakers of Hubertese in, say,
some part of the Waldviertel in Lower Austria, all we would have to do is to
transform the ECP to the parameter (3):
(3) Empty categories must/must not be properly governed.
Arguments of this type are sometimes brought forward to call the empirical
nature of the whole GB-approach in question (cf., e.g., the introductory remarks