27.4651, Review: Linguistic Theories; Semantics; Syntax: Giusti (2015)
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Subject: 27.4651, Review: Linguistic Theories; Semantics; Syntax: Giusti (2015)
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Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2016 11:14:09
From: Joseph Windsor [jww.phonology at gmail.com]
Subject: Nominal Syntax at the Interfaces: A Comparative Analysis of Languages With Articles
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-140.html
AUTHOR: Giuliana Giusti
TITLE: Nominal Syntax at the Interfaces: A Comparative Analysis of Languages With Articles
PUBLISHER: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Joseph W Windsor, University of Calgary
Introduction
Nominal Syntax at the Interfaces provides support for a hypothesis that
differentiates articles in European languages from other so-called
determiners: syntactic elements such as proper nouns, pronouns, possessives,
quantifiers, and demonstratives. Giusti argues that while articles, in
languages that have them, are functional elements, the other so-called
determiners do not meet (all of) the eight established criteria for functional
categories:
Characteristics of functional categories (p. 127; cf. Abney 1987)
- They constitute a closed class
- They can be sisters only to one kind of category
- They can be phonologically and/or morphologically dependent
- They are usually inseparable from their sister projection
- They display a high degree of cross-linguistic variation (and
micro-variation)
- They may be phonologically null
- The conditions on their merging are syntactic in nature
- They lack substantive content
By examining the distribution of nominal elements (the various so-called
determiners, articles, nouns and adjectives) in a handful of European
languages, and evaluating them against the criteria in (1), Giusti concludes
that articles are merely inflectional morphology of a scattered N0 which has
been internally remerged to complete its extended projection. The notion that
articles are inflectional morphemes (which may be bound or free depending on
the parameterization of the language) makes the prediction that they are
necessarily, categorically, different from other so-called determiners – a
prediction that Giusti examines in detail, providing a plethora of evidence
from various languages to support.
Summary
The arguments for differentiating articles from other so-called determiners
are broken down into an introduction, six substantive chapters, and a
conclusion which recognises some of the limitations of the current work and
areas for future research.
Chapter 1 situates the reader in terms of the theoretical framework that
Giusti utilizes/argues for throughout the book. She assumes a minimalist
framework (à la Chomsky 1995) which utilizes extended projections (in the
sense of Grimshaw 1991) to allow for frequent internal merger (similar to
Kayne 1994) to achieve the correct syntactic relations for Agree, Concord, and
Projection – which she argues are necessarily different operations, requiring
different structural relationships:
- Agree: Featuring-sharing triggered by Selection
- Concord: Feature-sharing through modification
- Projection: Feature-sharing via multiple merger (“head-movement” and
“article insertion)
These different operations, and the differences between them, are used
throughout the other substantive chapters to argue for the syntax that
underlays the various constructions under examination. In this chapter, Giusti
also introduces the unfamiliar reader to other core assumptions used therein,
such as: the syntactic relations at the interfaces (LF and PF), the Principle
of Full Interpretation, Economy, and parallelism between the nominal and
verbal domains – especially at the Left Edge, the position she argues is the
syntactic locus of referentiality.
Chapter 2 is titled “Articles at the Interfaces”, which, like the book’s
title, is misleading as there is little-to-no discussion of the interface with
PF. This chapter details three competing syntax/semantics accounts of articles
and other determiner-like elements, and what the functions of those elements
are (Longobardi 1994; Chierchia 1998; and, Bošković 2008). The core of the
proposal addressed in this chapter is an attempt to unify the previous
proposals and argue that; while articles (null or overt) are realized in the
position typically labelled D, the other so-called determiners are the
realization of an ι-Operator, which provides a referential index to an
argument, and are in the position typically labelled Spec,DP.
Chapter 3 further situates the reader in the theoretical framework used to
explore the proposal that articles are inflectional morphology on an N. Giusti
expands on her previous assertion that Agreement and Concord are necessarily
different syntactic operations, which will later be used to drive the
syntactic representation she argues for. This chapter provides empirical data
from a few European languages (notably, Italian, Czech, Romanian, and English)
to show how the different processes work: that Agree is always a C-command
relation, and Concord is always modification, which derives the difference
between articles (heads) and the other so-called determiners (modifiers).
Chapter 4, for this reader, is by far the most substantive chapter, where
Giusti provides the best evidence for her proposal. She investigates each of
the other so-called determiners, comparing them against articles in a slightly
wider variety of European languages to show that the predictions made by her
proposal are largely borne out. She also shows that, unlike articles, the
other determiner-like elements do not satisfy the eight criteria of functional
elements provided in (1). Much of the evidence in this chapter comes from
co-occurrence, feature-sharing, and ordering. Giusti provides evidence from
languages such as Irish to show demonstratives and articles co-occur:
an fear seo
def man this
‘this man’ (Irish: Modified from Giusti’s (15b), p.135)
Giusti uses this type of co-occurrence data to show that articles and other
nominal elements like demonstratives must have different syntactic positions –
something absent from much of the current literature on demonstratives in
European languages (cf. Roehrs 2013 and references therein). Extending the
co-occurrence prediction, Giusti argues that, owing to the Principle of
Economy, we predict that in some languages, personal pronouns and articles
will be in complementary distribution, while it is expected that they will
co-occur in others. However, because articles are argued to occupy D0 and
other so-called determiners (other than quantifiers) are argued to universally
occupy Spec,DP, she predicts that pronouns and demonstratives will never
co-occur. This is where the cursory glance at various European languages fails
Giusti; while she cites Irish as a language in which articles and
demonstratives obligatorily co-occur, she misses the fact that demonstratives
in Irish also frequently occur with personal pronouns (as well as vocatives
and proper names):
Demonstratives with pronouns (adapted from McCloskey 2004)
Chuaigh sé seo ar seachrán
go.pst 3.sg.m.nom dem on straying
‘this person went astray’
B’fhearr liom é seo fanacht sa bhaile
prefer with.1.sg 3.sg.m.acc dem stay in home
‘I’d prefer this person to stay at home’
Demonstratives with proper nouns (adapted from McCloskey 2004)
Muiris Bhidí seo
Muiris Bhidí dem
‘this person Muiris Bhidí’
Bhí urradh as miosúr i nGoll seo
be.pst strength out.of measure in Goll dem
‘this guy Goll had astonishing strength’
Given the strong prediction made in her §4.4. (p. 155) that these elements
will never co-occur, it is not clear how Giusti would account for these data,
or what consequences data such as these hold for the proposal that she
advances: that both of these elements are always modifiers in Spec,DP.
Chapter 5 deals with the central claim of the entire work; that articles, in
addition to having different distributional properties, features, and
semantics to the other so-called determiners, are inflectional morphology
realized on a “scattered N.” Giusti uses the term “scattered N” throughout the
work, but never completely defines it. She uses this term to refer to the
internal merger (head-movement) of a lexical head, in this case, N, within its
extended projection. This chapter provides short case studies of language
specific phenomena in Italian, Scandinavian (Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and
Icelandic), and German to support the hypothesis that articles can/should be
analyzed as inflectional morphology on the noun.
The final substantive chapter, Chapter 6, deals with an issue for the analysis
of articles as functional elements which realize inflectional morphology of
the noun; that is, that one of the criteria for functional elements —that they
can be sisters to only one category as in (1b)— is apparently violated in some
languages, like Greek, that allow adjectives to also take articles through
determiner spreading:
to megalo (to) vivlio
the big the book
‘the big book’ (Giusti’s 11b, p.194)
To account for this apparent problem with her hypothesis, Giusti again
provides three small case studies on specific phenomena in Balkan languages
(Albanian, Greek, and Romanian), Italian, and German. She accounts for the
data such as that in (6) by arguing that, due to her scattered N hypothesis,
the article that appears to associate with the adjective in Greek is actually
the realization of interpretable nominal features of a null N (p. 197), and
cannot be the part of a scattered Adjectival head.
As previously mentioned, the book concludes with a recognition of some of the
limitations of the research presented (i.e., that only European languages were
investigated with sporadic glances at languages like Hungarian and Hebrew),
and suggests avenues for future research; specifically, how to deal with
articles in polysynthetic languages. In my subsequent evaluation of the work,
I will attempt to stay within the defined limits of this research.
Evaluation
Although I agree with many of the insights provided by the author concerning
referentiality and nominal-verbal parallelism, I am unfortunately left
unconvinced that a scattered N hypothesis is a syntactic universal (Giusti
argues that the conclusions of Chapter 5 unify an analysis of both languages
with, and without, articles (p.188)). Some of this skepticism for the
universality of this proposal comes from the range of interpretations given to
articles cross-linguistically. As Giusti notes (p. 78), Matthewson (1998)
notes that articles cross-linguistically do not have a unique semantic value;
she provides the example in (7, her example 50) to illustrate this fact:
a. definiteness English
- specificity Turkish (Enç 1991), Polynesian (Chung 1978)
- visibility Bella Coola (Davis & Saunders 1975)
- proximity St’at’imcets (Van Eijk 1997).
Given the difference in possible semantic values of articles
cross-linguistically, a question is raised as to whether or not all of these
elements represent a homogeneous cross-linguistic category. Especially
problematic for the proposal are languages which utilize deictic determiners
(7d) (cf. Wiltschko 2014); if Giusti does extend her analysis to other
languages, including polysynthetic ones such as the Indigenous languages of
North America, she will need to account for deictic/non-deictic determiners in
languages like Squamish (Wiltschko 2014), which are necessarily different from
the demonstrative/article system of Blackfoot (see Windsor & Lewis
forthcoming). I anticipate that an analysis of such languages would make it
very difficult for her to maintain the strong hypothesis that syntactic
categories (i.e., articles) are universally inflectional morphology, and that
demonstratives are universally specifiers. Apart from investigating other
non-European languages, I believe a more in depth investigation of the
interfaces with syntax would also prove difficult for Giusti’s current
proposal.
For a book titled, Nominal Syntax at the Interfaces, there is a distinct lack
of influence from multiple interfaces. While Giusti does utilize some semantic
arguments in Chapter 2, despite the claim that the essay aims to fill a gap in
the literature by providing syntactic arguments in support of semantic
analyses (p. 1), those semantic analyses are almost entirely missing from the
remainder of the book. More importantly, if the work is to be concerned with
multiple interfaces, as the title suggests, one would expect to see the
interface with PF also play a role in the discussion. Instead, the spell-out
to PF is limited to a few small discussions on the timing of syntactic phases,
and little more than a page of discussion of phonological forms in Italian
(§6.2), which begins with the statement that the definite article in Italian
“is morpho-phonologically dependent on the phonological form of the following
word” (p. 202); and ends with the conclusion that “these forms cannot be
captured by general phonological rules and are the result of standardization”
(p. 203) in apparent contradiction of the initial statement. Had Giusti
considered a more in depth investigation into the interface with PF, she may
have been forced to abandon some of the structures she proposes; specifically,
that demonstratives are always specifiers. By investigating the
phonology-syntax interface in Irish, I use data from pitch accents, consonant
weakening (lenition), phonological phrasing, co-occurrence, scope, and
coordination (Windsor 2014 et seq.) to show that--pace Giusti (1993 et seq.),
Brugè (2002), and Roberts (to appear)--demonstratives cannot universally be
specifiers and must be analysed as projections within the nominal spine, at
least in Irish (see also Windsor & Lewis forthcoming for a phonology-syntax
and syntax-semantics analysis of demonstratives in Blackfoot, which lends
cross-linguistic support to the fact that demonstratives are not universally
specifiers).
Despite the fact that the arguments in this book have not convinced me that a
scattered N hypothesis is the correct analysis for articles
cross-linguistically, I contend that many of the insights provided by Giusti
are especially valuable as research in this area continues. One of the most
valuable contributions of this book is the notion that demonstratives (and
possibly other Left Edge elements) realize an ι-Operator, which is responsible
for providing the referential index to an argument. Although Irish and
Blackfoot data, as mentioned above, would potentially be very problematic for
Giusti’s scattered N analysis, I reach the same conclusion about the syntactic
function of demonstratives in those languages on independent grounds. Thus,
while the scattered N analysis might fail once other languages also receive an
in depth analysis, the insights into the function of these Left Edge elements
can be cross-theoretically backed up. The referential ι-Op in the Left Edge of
nominal expressions gains further cross-theoretical support when one considers
the nominal-verbal parallelism that Giusti underscores her analysis with:
Giusti argues in the initial chapters of this book that the Left Edge of
nominal expressions are parallel to the Left Edge of clauses (she seems to
remain agnostic as to whether the appropriate parallel of D is C or T, but
argues that there is a higher projection in the nominal domain devoted to
hosting displaced elements associated with discourse features – see also
Giusti 1996; Aboh 2004; Thoma 2014; or, Wiltchko 2014 for supporting
cross-linguistic evidence of this). If there is an ι-Op which provides
referentiality to an argument at the Left Edge of a nominal expression,
associated with demonstratives for example, then we expect to find a clausal
parallel of this structure. This prediction also seems to be borne out with
several other researchers arguing that CP is the domain of referentiality in
the clause (Cinque 1990; Szabolcsi 2006; deCuba 2007; deCuba & Ürögdi 2009;
deCuba & MacDonald 2012, 2013; Haegeman 2006; Haegeman & Ürögdi 2010).
Haegeman (2006), in fact, argues that the referential features of CP are best
analyzed as speaker deixis, a striking parallel to demonstratives at the Left
Edge of nominal expressions. Finally, deCuba (2007), and deCuba & MacDonald
(2012, 2013) argue on independent grounds that clausal referentiality, or lack
thereof, utilizes a null ι-Op to explain the distribution of sentential
complement clauses of factive and non-factive verbs in a variety of European
languages, and embedded polarity answers in Spanish respectively.
Insights such as the obvious distinction between articles and other so-called
determiners such as demonstratives (and between demonstratives and adjectives
pace. Leu (2008) and Roehrs (2013) and references therein), and the semantic
function of occupants of the Left Edge of nominal expressions as providing
referential indexes to arguments are the major strengths of this work; these
insights transcend theoretical commitments and must be accounted for by any
author working in this area regardless of the hypothesis they pursue.
Conclusion
Nominal Syntax at the Interfaces is not an aptly titled book as it has very
little to do with syntax at the interfaces, though there is a limited
discussion of semantics. The primary focus of this book is in arguing for a
universal analysis of articles as inflectional morphology of an internally
merged, or “scattered,” noun. Part of the evidence for a scattered N
hypothesis comes from empirical data presented from several European
languages, and part of the evidence is theoretical, stemming from the author’s
treatment of three separate syntactic operations (Agree, Concord, and
Projection), which allow feature sharing through different structural
relations. The latter theoretical contribution is used to motivate when a
syntactic element internally merges, used to ultimately argue for the
structures presented in favour of the scattered N.
In this review, I have presented no arguments against the scattered N
hypothesis as it was used to account for the data examined in the book. At
times, in reading some of the sections, I was skeptical of the analysis, but
the predictions made by the hypotheses were borne out. The skepticism I have
presented here stems from the claim that the scattered N analysis should be
universal, including a prediction for a null ι-Op in Spec,DP in languages
without articles (p.188)). Although there is not consensus as to whether a DP
projection exists in all languages (i.e., Longobardi 1994; Chierchia 1998;
Borer 2003; Bošković 2008), this book provides additional evidence in favour
of a universal DP claim; and, while I take no issue with a universal DP layer
hypothesis (or at least a universal anchoring layer, regardless of label, cf.
Wiltschko 2014), I am not convinced by the argument that all languages could
be analyzed with a scattered N as Giusti puts forward in this book.
Despite the skepticism I have outlined here, I believe that the author makes
several important a-theoretical contributions, especially in her insight into
the syntactic position of referential indexes being at the Left Edge of the
nominal expression, in a position higher than D. This, and the fact that
nominal elements such as demonstratives, pronouns, and proper nouns seem to
have very different distributional facts from articles in many, if not all,
languages are insights that any researcher working in this area will need to
account for, regardless of their theoretical commitment, or whether they are
convinced by the scattered N hypothesis advanced by Giusti.
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ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Joseph W. Windsor is a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics at the University of
Calgary. His research focuses on the phonology-syntax interface of nominal
expressions and nominal-verbal parallelism, which he investigates primarily
using data from Irish and Blackfoot. His forthcoming dissertation, The
Demonstrative Phrase: Prosodic and Syntactic Evidence from Irish and Blackfoot
argues that (at least in the languages of focus) demonstratives are not
specifiers, but rather, part of the nominal spine, and suggests consequences
this analysis has for both the Minimalist Program, and the Universal Spine
Hypothesis.
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