[parislinguists] conference Phoevos Panagiotidis

[lea nash]

L'équipe 'Axe Minimaliste'
de l'UMR 7023 'STRUCTURES FORMELLES DU LANGAGE'
a le plaisir d'annoncer la prochaine séance de son séminaire:

               The categorial deficiency of functional heads and phrase 
structure
                                                           Phoevos 
Panagiotidis
	                                                                  
(Cyprus College)




Date : lundi 10 mai 2004
Lieu : locaux de l'UMR 7023, 15 rue Catulienne, 93 Saint-Denis - salle 
205
Heure : 11h-13h
Métro : 'Basilique de Saint-Denis'
RER : 'Saint-Denis'


Abstract

In Panagiotidis (2002), an analysis of pronouns as intransitive 
Determiner heads, i.e. Determiners without nominal complements, is 
argued against. Arguments against Determiners, and functional heads in 
general, occurring without a lexical complement range from purely 
empirical to largely conceptual. One of the conceptual arguments is that 
functional heads are categorially deficient, marked for the 
uninterpretable version of the categorial feature that the lexical head 
at the bottom of their projection line bears. Hence, if verbs bear a [V] 
feature, v, Asp and T will all also bear an uninterpretable [*V] 
feature. Similar facts hold for the nominal functional heads Num and D: 
they must also bear an uninterpretable [*N] feature. If Determiners, or 
indeed any functional head, do not have a lexical head inside their 
complement, their uninterpretable version of the categorial feature will 
reach LF, causing the derivation to crash.

Categorial deficiency, far from being an ad hoc curiosity of functional 
heads that gets facts about their distribution right, has at least three 
important ramifications about Merge and Move, the phrase structure 
architecture in general:
a.	it motivates an LF mechanism behind head movement,
b.	it captures Li’s (1990) Generalisation,
c.	it explains the inability of a lexical head to appear sandwiched 
between functional heads.
The status of head (X0-) movement has been a source of interesting 
debate during the last decade, given that it seems not to be fully 
compatible with Bare Phrase Structure (Chomsky 1995). Consequently, it 
has been suggested that X0-movement is in fact the result of a series of 
applications of remnant movement that lines heads up (Kayne, 2000; 
Mahajan, 2000), or that it is morphophonological in nature (Chomsky, 
2001; Boeckx & Stjepanović, 2001; Harley, 2003). Here I argue that the 
commonest version of X0-movement is not only LF-related, but, a 
fortiori, that it is triggered by a fundamental property of Universal 
Grammar. Lexical heads systematically moving up their projection line 
are attested in a number of languages: English V to v, Romance V to v to 
T, Germanic V to v to T to C, Danish and Romanian N to D, Lezgian N to D 
to P (van Riemsdijk, 1998). A valid question at this point is what 
motivates this ‘climbing up’ of lexical heads – whatever the status of 
the operation. I would wish to address this non-trivial question by 
appealing to categorial deficiency: X0-movement (except Incorporation) 
is driven by the need for the uninterpretable categorial features of 
functional heads to be checked before LF, be it before or after Spell 
Out. The fact that the overt part of this movement within verbal 
projections, for instance, can be as short as V to v (in English) or as 
long as V to C (in Germanic) is of no consequence regarding its status. 
Accordingly, X0-movement is both universal, as all languages have some 
functional structure above their lexical heads, and LF-motivated, as LF 
interpretable categorial features (Baker 2003) must check their 
uninterpretable versions by LF. The exact formulation of the mechanism 
for X0-movement is of course open to investigation and – at least its 
‘covert’ part – can be reduced to the operation Agree. Nevertheless, the 
understanding must be that it is LF-motivated.

Li (1990) observed that X0-movement of a lexical head through a 
functional head to another lexical head is impossible. Consider the 
relevant configuration in  below:
(1)	V [V] … D [*N] … N [N]
Although the uninterpretable [*N] feature on D, a functional head, will 
attract the N head triggering X0-movement, there is nothing on V to 
subsequently attract the complex head [D N D] formed by this operation. 
Moreover, the [V] feature of the former and the [N] feature of the 
latter are in mismatch, rendering operations such as N to D to V 
movement illicit.

Finally, this view of categorial deficiency as the motivation behind 
X0-movement captures another little-discussed, but fundamental, aspect 
of phrase structure: lexical heads obligatorily appear at the bottom of 
their projection line:
(2)	* D…N…Num	* T…V…Asp…v
The reason is now simple to discern: in configurations like the ones 
in , the uninterpretable feature [*N] of D would attract N and the 
uninterpretable feature [*V] of T would attract V. Nevertheless, this 
would entail that the uninterpretable feature [*N] of Num and [*V] of 
Asp and v would remain unchecked (rightward head movement is impossible) 
and reach LF causing the derivation to crash.

References
Baker, Mark 2003. Lexical Categories: verbs, nouns and adjectives. 
Cambridge: CUP.
Boeckx, Cedric & Stjepanović, Sandra 2001. Head-ing toward PF. 
Linguistic Inquiry 32: 345-355.
Chomsky, Noam (1993) A Minimalist Program for linguistic theory. In 
Hale, K. & Keyser, S.-J. (eds.) The view from Building 20. Cambridge, 
Mass.: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam 1995. The Minimalist program. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press
Chomsky, Noam 2001a. Derivation by phase. In Kenstowicz M. (ed.) Ken 
Hale. A life in Language. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam 2001b. Beyond Explanatory Adequacy. Unpublished ms., MIT.
Grimshaw, Jane 1991. Extended Projection. Unpublished ms., Brandeis 
University.
Harley, Heidi 2003. Merge, conflation, and head movement: the First 
Sister Principle revisited. Talk presented at NELS 34, Stony Brook.
Kayne, Richard 2000. Overt versus covert movement. In: Parameters and 
Universals. Oxford: OUP.
Li, Yafei 1990. X0-binding and verb incorporation. Linguistic Inquiry 
21: 399-426.
Mahajan, Anoop 2000. Eliminating head movement. Talk presented at GLOW 
2000, Vitoria-Gasteiz.
Panagiotidis, Phoevos 2002. Pronouns, Clitics and Empty Nouns. 
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
van Riemsdijk, Henk 1998 Categorial feature magnetism: the 
endocentricity and distribution of projections. Journal of Comparative 
Germanic Linguistics 2: 1-48.



Dr Phoevos Panagiotidis
Assistant Professor of Linguistics

Dept. of Humanities
Cyprus College
Diogenous St. 6, Engomi
PO Box 22006
1516 Nicosia
Cyprus

Tel.: (+357) 22 713120
Fax: (+357) 22 590539

panagiotidis@ cycollege.ac.cy
http://sting.cycollege.ac.cy/~panagiotidis
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