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<div style="direction: ltr;font-family: Tahoma;color: #000000;font-size: 10pt;">I guess mention should be made too of Kayne's antisymmetry hypothesis, which was developed about the same time as the MP and which makes a clear presumption about which order is
to be taken as basic within UG. Other orders have to be derived by movement.<br>
Nigel<br>
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<div style="font-family:Tahoma; font-size:13px">Professor Nigel Vincent, FBA MAE<br>
Professor Emeritus of General & Romance Linguistics<br>
The University of Manchester</div>
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<div>Linguistics & English Language<br>
School of Arts, Languages and Cultures<br>
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<div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"></span>The University of Manchester</div>
<div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"></span>Manchester M13 9PL</div>
<div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"></span>UK</div>
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http://staffprofiles.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/Profile.aspx?Id=nigel.vincent</div>
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<div style="direction: ltr;" id="divRpF615891"><font face="Tahoma" color="#000000" size="2"><b>From:</b> Lingtyp [lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org] on behalf of Kilu von Prince [watasenia@gmail.com]<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Thursday, March 24, 2016 8:30 AM<br>
<b>To:</b> fjn@uw.edu<br>
<b>Cc:</b> LINGTYP@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG<br>
<b>Subject:</b> Re: [Lingtyp] 'basic word order' in the MP<br>
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<div dir="ltr">Hi Fritz,
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<div>I think you are right, the MP does not really tell us much about the order of heads relative to their complements, but I think it does make some predictions about word order in general. For example, an order of VSO, where the verb and the object are separated
by another constituent should have to involve more movement than an order of, for example, VOS and should therefore be more marked and typologically less frequent. This prediction is not borne out by the typological data in WALS and I'm not aware of any commentary
on this.</div>
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<div>Having said that, the MP is by no means the favourite framework among generative syntactitians. Principles and Parameters are still quite popular and my impression is that many generative syntactitians who care about typology at all favour the asymmetry
hypothesis, which is based on G&B. For recent contributions in that area, see Hubert Haider's work on head directionality. This approach was essentially inspired by typological word-order distributions and does a decent job of addressing them.</div>
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<div>Best,</div>
<div>Kilu</div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 9:56 PM, David Beck <span dir="ltr">
<<a href="mailto:dbeck@ualberta.ca" target="_blank">dbeck@ualberta.ca</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex; border-left:1px #ccc solid; padding-left:1ex">
Hi, Fritz<br>
<br>
I haven’t really been tracking the theory much since the late ‘90s, but I’m not sure that it is true that linearization does “take place” at PF, since a tremendous amount of argumentation (pretty much all of it) in this syntactic framework still depends on
moving things around in the syntactic tree (which I always understood to be pre-PF) to get the surface order. So even though X-bar is offically gone, most of the papers I see still use the same assumptions about binary branching and head-complement ordering
at D-structure, and use the same kind of movement rules (I guess it’s only one kind these days, but it does pretty much the same job). These papers generally argue for a particular phrase being moved or not in the syntactic tree based on where it is linearized
in the sentence.<br>
<br>
But even if the final tree-structure before Spell-Out reflects the linear order of the sentence, I think that your point is correct, ‘basic order’ isn’t going to be a very coherent or clearly defined concept, since surface-order is going to be determined on
a construction-specific basis (depending on which heads have to move to check which phi-features, what barriers there are in a given construction to the movements, which landing sites are available, etc.). So Irish is VSO in a certain type of clause because
the requirements for feature-checking move V ahead of S, and that movement might be blocked in another type of clause where the conditions are different, or other conditions might move-S ahead of V in another construction, etc. I would guess that the only
way to postulate a “basic” order for the language would be to talk in terms of the order that requires the fewest movements, or requires the fewest “special” conditions regulating movement (which is kind of the way everyone else does it, too).<br>
<br>
David<br>
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> On Mar 23, 2016, at 1:47 PM, <a href="mailto:fjn@uw.edu" target="_blank">fjn@uw.edu</a> wrote:<br>
><br>
> Dear Lingtyp,<br>
><br>
> I’m not sure how many formal linguists read this list, but some of you might have thought about this issue or have seen a reference. Do you know if anybody has taken on the question of 'basic word order' (VSO, OSV, etc.) within the Minimalist Program? It
is not obvious that it is still a coherent notion. Given the abandonment of the level of D-structure and of X-bar theory and given that it is generally assumed (right?) that linearization takes place in PF, there is no obvious level or stage in the grammar
that would identify Irish as VSO, Japanese as SOV, etc. While the mechanics of PF-syntax (at least to me) are quite murky, it seems like you would have to introduce something like extrinsic ordering in that component to postulate a 'basic order' for a particular
language. For a language with only one ordering of S, O and V there is no issue, but every language, I think, allows more than one ordering.<br>
><br>
> Any thoughts on all of this?<br>
><br>
> Thanks,<br>
><br>
> —fritz<br>
><br>
> Frederick J. Newmeyer<br>
> Professor Emeritus, University of Washington<br>
> Adjunct Professor, U of British Columbia and Simon Fraser U<br>
><br>
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