24.2672, Review: Morphology; Syntax: Haegeman (2012)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-24-2672. Tue Jul 02 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.2672, Review: Morphology; Syntax: Haegeman (2012)

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Reviews: Veronika Drake, U of Wisconsin Madison
Monica Macaulay, U of Wisconsin Madison
Rajiv Rao, U of Wisconsin Madison
Joseph Salmons, U of Wisconsin Madison
Mateja Schuck, U of Wisconsin Madison
Anja Wanner, U of Wisconsin Madison
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Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2013 10:56:22
From: Tatjana Scheffler [tscheffler at gmail.com]
Subject: Adverbial Clauses, Main Clause Phenomena, and Composition of the Left Periphery

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/23/23-4988.html

AUTHOR: Liliane  Haegeman
TITLE: Adverbial Clauses, Main Clause Phenomena, and Composition of the Left Periphery
SUBTITLE: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 8
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2012

REVIEWER: Tatjana Scheffler, Universität Potsdam

SUMMARY

In this book, Liliane Haegeman sets out to provide a syntactic account of the
internal structure of adverbial clauses, in particular, to explain the
compatibility of only some adverbial clauses with so-called main clause
phenomena (MCP) on syntactic grounds. The specific approach taken follows the
tradition of cartographic analysis of syntax, or the articulated left
periphery. Haegeman first introduces the specific MCP on which she bases her
analysis, i.e., argument fronting in English. After extensive discussion of
the data reported in the literature and some novel observations, the author
presents her syntactic account for the distribution of MCP in main clauses. As
the main contribution of the book, she then carries over this cartographic
analysis to adverbial clauses, arguing that adverbial clauses fall into two
distinct classes, which she calls ''central'' and ''peripheral'' adverbial
clauses. MCP are ruled out in central adverbial clauses through intervention
effects, according to Haegeman. On the other hand, MCP are allowed in
peripheral adverbial clauses because of their different syntactic structure.
After arguing this case for temporal and conditional clauses, Haegeman
tentatively extends the movement account to other types of embedded clauses,
namely complements of factive verbs, complements of N, and subject clauses.

The book consists of six chapters. The first chapter provides an overview of
the history of the left periphery and its analysis in generative grammar. The
presentation is based on illustrative examples from the extensive literature
on the topic. Already in this first chapter, the considerable variation
concerning crucial grammaticality judgments, even in the reported literature,
becomes obvious. Throughout, Haegeman conscientiously points out such
variation and acknowledges it, even when it cannot be explained within the
scope of the book.

Chapter Two contains detailed data on argument fronting in English, both for
topicalized as well as focalized arguments. The presented data is aggregated
from the literature, with the addition of differing judgments in some cases.
The data discussed is completed by attested examples. Contrasting arguments
and adjuncts in the left periphery of a clause, Haegeman shows that fronted
adjuncts are generally allowed, while fronted arguments are ruled out in most
embedded clauses, and give rise to intervention effects. The author then
compares English argument fronting with Romance clitic left-dislocation
(CLLD), a construction used for expressing a topic-comment structure which
contains a resumptive clitic for the dislocated constituent. The collected
data shows that Romance CLLD generally patterns with English fronted adjuncts
by being permitted even in embedded contexts and not triggering intervention
effects. Haegeman calls the different behavior of English arguments vs.
adjuncts and English argument fronting vs. Romance CLLD the ''double
asymmetry'' of fronted constituents. It is the main empirical finding on which
the analyses in the remainder of the book are based.

The cartographic approach to the left periphery, as presented in Chapter One,
makes available a range of distinct syntactic positions which can be filled by
fronted constituents, including at least a position for focalized phrases and
several topic positions. However, not all positions can be filled
simultaneously. Chapter Three presents two possible analyses to account for
the unavailability of certain sentences in English, in particular, sentences
where a lower topic is dominated by a fronted argument in a focus, topic, or
wh-position. After discussing a strictly positional account, which only
explains some of the data, Haegeman introduces a feature-based proposal and
argues that the unavailability of certain combinations in the left periphery
is reduced to effects of the locality condition on movement.

Chapters Four and Five address the central topic of the book, the distribution
of MCP, and most notably, argument fronting in adverbial clauses. In Chapter
Four, Haegeman introduces the distinction between central and peripheral
adverbial clauses (p. 160). She notes that temporal adverbials, such as those
introduced by 'while' or 'when', have an additional concessive reading.
Haegeman claims that the temporal reading modifies the event denoted by the
main clause and calls those adverbials ''central'' adverbials. The concessive
uses, she argues, are discourse-structuring, i.e., ''peripheral'' adverbial
clauses. The distinction between central and peripheral adverbial clauses is
crucial to the following discussion, and is extended to other types of
conjunctions, such as conditional and causal conjunctions. The remainder of
the chapter contains an empirical study of the syntax of the two types of
adverbial clauses. Peripheral adverbial clauses are argued to be less closely
associated with the main clause; they are outside the scope of matrix
operators, and are not temporally subordinated. In contrast, peripheral
adverbial clauses are shown to allow MCP, such as English argument fronting.

Chapter Five presents the main new theoretical contribution of the book, a
movement analysis of adverbial clauses that explains the status of MCP in the
two different types of adverbial clauses. Having established the
argument/adjunct asymmetry in the left periphery as a diagnostic for movement
in the previous chapters, Haegeman first reanalyzes temporal adverbial clauses
as derived by movement. The analysis of when-clauses as free relative clauses
is extended to other temporal clauses with 'since', 'before', etc. It is shown
that in most cases, these clauses also allow for low construal of the time
phrase (an indicator of movement), which can, however, be blocked by islands.
A parallel analysis is then given for ''central'' conditional clauses based on
Bhatt and Pancheva (2006). Again, the asymmetry between fronted arguments and
adjuncts in English (adjuncts are allowed, but not arguments) and the
possibility of CLLD in Romance are taken as evidence for the movement account
of these conditional clauses.

Finally, Chapter Six investigates to what extent the movement and intervention
approach proposed for adverbial clauses in the book can account for the
absence of MCP in certain complement clauses. In each case, the author follows
the recipe established in the previous chapters: first, the impossibility of
MCP is shown, followed by a demonstration of the ''double asymmetry'' between
fronted arguments and adjuncts in English and between English argument
fronting and CLLD, which is taken as a diagnostic for the presence of
movement. Then, a null operator is motivated, which triggers the movement.
This analysis is applied to complements of factive verbs, complements of N,
and subject clauses.

EVALUATION

The book's value for the field goes beyond the particular syntactic framework
and analysis championed here. Due to the data aggregation in the first two
chapters alone, this book is a must-read for anyone concerned with syntactic
phenomena of the left periphery in English. In 100 pages, Haegeman collects
over 100 examples from the extensive literature on the topic and presents them
in a logical way. The presentation is complicated by the sometimes
considerable variation in the reported judgments, which the author
conscientiously reports, and at times, supplements with additional differing
judgments. These chapters include many long footnotes which, in some cases,
span several pages. Even though the collection of data itself is valuable to
experts and graduate students interested in the left periphery, the data
chapters would have been easier to follow if the book had started with a
clearer exposition of the structure of the book and the arguments in later
chapters, or if some less crucial data points had been omitted. For example,
the relevance of the discussion of verb phrase ellipsis in footnotes (39-44)
is unclear to the reader at this point in the book, and thus, could have been
left out. In some cases, the reader is confused by small errata such as
mismatched references to examples or footnotes.

Methodologically, the proposals in the second part of the book are based on
the data collected and analyzed in the first chapters. It is unfortunate that
the concepts ''topic'' and ''focus'', which are centrally featured in the
book, especially in Chapter 3, were not clearly defined beyond a reference to
''old information'' and ''new information''.

In Chapter Three, the impossibility of argument fronting is analyzed as a kind
of intervention effect based on syntactic features; an entity with a richer
feature set can move across an entity with a more impoverished feature set,
but not the other way around. While the analysis leads to relatively good
results, a freely chosen feature set would, of course, be able to account for
any constraints on the left periphery. The proposal, therefore, depends on
good independent motivation for the proposed features associated with
different types of phrases. For wh-phrases, it has been previously argued that
only a small subset of these phrases is ''D-linked'' (Pesetsky, 1987), which,
in feature terms, means it contains a D-feature. In these cases, according to
Haegeman, the wh-phrase blocks topicalization. Based on the observation that
yes-no-questions (for some speakers) block topicalization but not
focalization, Haegeman tentatively concludes that yes-no-questions contain a
D-feature, i.e., are D-linked. This seems counter-intuitive. Such a claim
could potentially be motivated or disputed by considering independent
arguments for D-linking.

In Chapter Four, the distinction between central and peripheral adverbial
clauses is made based on the two readings available for many temporal
conjunctions: one temporal reading, and one concessive or causal (Table 4.3,
p. 164). However, the main arguments (especially temporal subordination) don't
clearly carry over to the other types of adverbials. In particular, for
'because' and 'if', the central and the peripheral adverbial share large parts
of their semantics, and can be distinguished from each other much less easily
than the clearly distinct readings of the temporal and causal 'since' or the
temporal and concessive 'while'. It is also surprising that concessive
adverbial clauses are apparently always peripheral. The central/peripheral
distinction for adverbial clauses does not seem to line up with the two kinds
of adverbial clauses previous authors have distinguished in semantic and
pragmatic literature. Here, starting with Rutherford (1970), a distinction is
made between ''restrictive'' and ''non-restrictive'' subordinated clauses, of
which the restrictive ones are more closely integrated with the main clause.
This notion seems to partially correspond to the distinction between
''central'' and ''peripheral'' adverbial clauses. It is all the more
surprising that the two sets of categories do not line up completely. For
example, Rutherford already allowed for both restrictive and non-restrictive
uses of concessive clauses, as in his examples (2a-b) (see also Sweetser,
1982, ex. (42)). In addition, causal 'since' can also be used either
restrictively or non-restrictively. Haegeman does mention the existence of
speech-act modifying adverbial clauses (Section 4.7), but claims they are
orthogonal to the discussed central/peripheral distinction. In contrast, many
authors seem to assume a major difference between propositional (central)
uses, on the one hand, and epistemic (peripheral) or speech-act-related uses,
on the other hand (Hooper & Thompson, 1973; Sweetser, 1982; Scheffler, 2013).
For German 'weil' ('because'), Haegeman aligns the central/peripheral split
with the internal syntax of the clause: central weil-clauses are verb-final
(VF), while peripheral weil-clauses are verb-second (V2). The discussion of
this phenomenon is simplified with respect to the extensive literature on the
topic (Sohmiya, 1975; Rudolph, 1980; Thim-Mabrey, 1982; Pasch, 1983a,b; Küper,
1984; Blühdorn, 2006, and others). The literature concentrates on the cases
where the two syntactic structures differ semantically, but in many cases,
verb-final and V2 weil-clauses can be used interchangeably. Motivation for the
claim that VF weil-clauses are central, whereas V2 weil-clauses are
peripheral, is based on a range of semantic facts, such as the inability of VF
weil-clauses to be in the scope of matrix operators and their inability to be
bound into by matrix quantifiers. Alternative analyses of these facts appeal
to semantic properties of the two kinds of 'weil' instead of syntactic ones
(Scheffler, 2005). Finally, Haegeman claims (based on Antomo, 2009) that
central (i.e. VF) weil-clauses are incompatible with speech act related modal
particles (cf. ex. (70a)), a statement that is easily disproved by a corpus
search. Examples with particles such as 'nämlich' or 'ja' are commonly
attested:

(i) Manche sagen, er wäre durchgefallen, weil er ja gar kein italienischer
Kandidat war, sondern der Kandidat von Merkel, Juncker und Sarkozy.
(http://bit.ly/14z683S)
Some say he failed because he JA is not at all an Italian candidate, but the
candidate of Merkel, Juncker and Sarkozy.

For example, in (i), the weil-clause is clearly a ''central'' clause, since it
not only exhibits verb-final word order, but is also clearly semantically
embedded within the higher clause ('he failed'). These, and similar examples,
suggest that either the alignment of clause-internal word order and the
central/peripheral status of the adverbial clause are not as strict as
assumed, or that syntactic and semantic factors (e.g. the semantic level of
the expressed relation - propositional, epistemic or speech-act related)
interact with each other to account for the data.

A similar problem with respect to the central/peripheral distinction arises
for conditionals. Since no clear independent definition of the notions
''central'' and ''peripheral'' is given, the distinction is in danger of
becoming circular. In the literature, many special subtypes of conditionals
are distinguished based on their semantic and sometimes morphosyntactic
properties (see Bhatt and Pancheva, 2006). In German, so-called relevance
conditionals exhibit a particular external syntax; while regular
(non-relevance) conditionals are integrated in the main clause as a phrase,
and can be preposed as the (single) preverbal constituent in the main clause,
relevance conditionals are less closely associated with the main clause. When
they are preposed, another constituent follows to fill the preverbal position.
In effect, while conditionals in English can be ambiguous between both
readings, they are always unambiguous in German:

(ii) Wenn Du mich brauchst, bleibe ich den ganzen Tag zu Hause.
If you need me, [only then] I will stay at home all day. (regular cond.)
(iii) Wenn Du mich brauchst, ich bleibe den ganzen Tag zu Hause.
If you need me, I'll be at home all day [anyway]. (relevance cond.)

However, while this distinction in German might be a reasonable interpretation
of the syntactic difference between ''central'' and ''peripheral''
conditionals, this does not seem to be what Haegeman has in mind. Instead,
judging from the examples and some of the exposition, what Haegeman calls
peripheral conditionals seem to more closely line up with the subtype called
factive or factual conditionals. In particular, she argues that peripheral
conditionals usually ''echo'' a previous discourse proposition. For future
research, it would be fruitful to more clearly define the central/peripheral
distinction and establish how, if at all, it relates to other
subclassifications of adverbial clauses, such as the
content/epistemic/speech-act level distinction for causal clauses (Sweetser,
1982) or the subcategories of conditionals, such as factual and relevance
conditionals (Bhatt and Pancheva, 2006), and others.

In conclusion, the book presents a cartographic analysis of the availability
and unavailability of main clause phenomena, in particular, argument fronting
in English in adverbial clauses. The author proposes a featural account
according to which adverbial clauses are derived by movement which gives rise
to intervention effects, prohibiting argument fronting for so-called central
adverbial clauses, but allowing it in peripheral clauses. This syntactic
proposal is interesting, well-motivated and presented in a logical and clear
structure. It opens up fruitful opportunities for further work on the
interface to semantics, which has also concerned itself with many of the
phenomena touched upon here. The book starts off with a large data section
which aggregates and complements previously reported judgments on the
composition of the left periphery in English. For this part alone, the volume
is a must read for any linguist interested in phenomena of the left periphery.
The author meticulously records disagreements and variation with regard to the
reported judgments, which can lead to new research into syntactic variation
and cross-linguistic studies.

REFERENCES

Antomo, Mailin. 2009. Interpreting embedded verb second. Paper presented at
ConSOLE XVII, Nova Gorica, January 16-18.

Bhatt, Rajesh and Roumyana Pancheva. 2006. Conditionals. In M. Everaert and H.
van Riemsdijk, The Blackwell companion to syntax. Oxford: Blackwell.

Blühdorn, Hardarik. 2006. Kausale Satzverknüpfungen im Deutschen. In:
Pandaemonium Germanicum. Revista de Estudos Germanisticos 10, 253-282. Sao
Paulo:vFFLCH-USP.

Hooper, J. and Sandra A. Thompson. 1973. On the applicability of root
transformations. In: Linguistic Inquiry 4, 465-498.

Küper, Christoph. 1984. Zum sprechaktbezogenen Gebrauch der Kausalverknüpfer
denn und weil: Grammatisch-pragmatische Interrelationen. In: Linguistische
Berichte 92, 15-30.

Pasch, Renate. 1983a. Die Kausalkonjunktionen “da”, “denn” und “weil”: drei
Konjunktionen - drei lexikalische Klassen. In: Deutsch als Fremdsprache
332-337.

Pasch, Renate. 1983b. Untersuchungen zu den Gebrauchsbedingungen der deutschen
Kausalkonnektoren da, denn und weil. In: Linguistische Studien des ZISW 104.

Pesetsky, David. 1987. Wh-in-Situ: Movement and unselective binding. In E.
Reuland and A. ter Meulen (eds.), The Representation of (In)definitness.
Cambridge: MIT Press. 98-129.

Rudolph, Elisabeth. 1980. Bemerkungen zur konnektiven Partikel denn. In: E.
Weigand and G. Tschauder (eds.), Perspektive textintern. Akten des 14.
Linguistischen Kolloquiums, Bochum 1979, vol. 1, 249-261. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Rutherford, William E. 1970. Some Observations concerning Subordinate Clauses
in English. In: Language 46.1, 97-115.

Scheffler, Tatjana. 2005. Syntax and semantics of causal denn in German. In:
P. Dekker and M. Franke (eds.), Proceedings of the Fifteenth Amsterdam
Colloquium.

Scheffler, Tatjana. 2013. Two-dimensional Semantics: Clausal Adjuncts and
Complements. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Sohmiya, Yoshikazu. 1975. Syntax und Semantik der kausalen Konjunktionen, denn
und weil. In: Doitsu Bungaku 42, 108-119.

Sweetser, Eve E. 1982. Root and Epistemic Modals: Causality in Two Worlds. In:
Proceedings of BLS 8, 484-507.

Thim-Mabrey, Christiane. 1982. Zur Syntax der kausalen Konjunktionen weil, da
und denn. In: Sprachwissenschaft 7, 197-219.

Cosmas II. Cosmas II corpora, Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim.
http://www.ids-mannheim.de/cosmas2/


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Tatjana Scheffler is a post-doc in the Linguistics Department at the
University of Potsdam, Germany. She received her PhD in 2008 from the
University of Pennsylvania for her dissertation on 'Semantic Operators in
Different Dimensions', the revised version of which was just published as
Volume 549 in the series Linguistische Arbeiten, titled 'Two-dimensional
Semantics. Clausal Adjuncts and Complements'. Her research interests are in
semantics, pragmatics, the syntax-semantics interface, computational
linguistics, discourse, and dialog.








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