Aspects Of Grammatical Architecture (Routledge Leading Lingu

Description: This volume collects eleven papers written between 1991 and 2016, some of them unpublished, which explore various aspects of the architecture of grammar in a minimalist perspective. The phenomena that are brought to bear on the architectural issue come from a range of languages, among them French, European Portuguese, Welsh, German and English, and include clitic placement, expletive pronouns, resumption, causative structures, copulative and existential constructions, VP ellipsis, as well as the distinction between the SVO, VSO and V2 linguistic types. This book sheds a new light on the division of labor between components and paves the way for further research on grammatical architecture.

Contents: 1. Introduction. Part I: Phrasal and Clausal Architecture. 2. Functional categories and agreement. 3. Proxy categories in phrase structure theory (with Lea Nash). 4. Bod in the present tense and in other tenses. Part II: Clitics and Phrase Structure. 5. Clitic placement and the Wackernagel position in European Portuguese. 6. Cliticization as Unselective Attract (with Lea Nash). Part III: The Architecture of Derivations. 7. VP ellipsis, phases and the syntax of morphology. 8. Hallmarks of Portuguese syntax. 9. Computational and semantic aspects of resumption. Part IV. The Architecture of Grammar. 10. Intervention or phasal locality? Two ways of being local in French causative constructions. 11. The expletive puzzle and the EPP.

Author Biography: Alain Rouveret is Emeritus Professor of General Linguistics at the Universite Paris-Diderot in Paris, France. He has also taught in Paris-Saint-Denis, as well as at Ecole Normale Superieure, at Ecole Polytechnique, at EHESS and at GLOW Summer Schools in Salzburg and Gerona. His main research interests are in comparative syntax, morphology, formal grammar and linguistic typology. Besides many articles in international journals, he has published Syntaxe du gallois: principes generaux et typologie (1994) and Arguments minimalistes. Une presentation du Programme Minimaliste de Noam Chomsky (2015).