Table Of ContentComparative Syntax and Language
Acquisition
This important work explores the key linguistic issues of syntactic theory,
comparative syntax, and the study of language acquisition. Written by Luigi
Rizzi, one of the discipline’s leading authorities, some of the essays collected
here have already been profoundly influential in their field. Others are published
here for the first time, and present important new directions for linguistic
research.
This study is centred on four major topics:
• the theory of principles and parameters, with special reference to the
properties and functioning of the pronominal systems
• the theory of locality
• the detailed study of syntactic configurations, leading to a refined cartography
of structural positions
• the theory-conscious comparative study of language acquisition and language
development.
This book represents an essential text for any linguist with a particular interest in
syntax and language acquisition.
Luigi Rizzi is a professor of linguistics at the University of Siena, Italy. He
was previously associate professor at MIT and professor at the University of
Geneva. He is the author of Issues in Italian Syntax and Relativized Minimality.
Routledge leading linguists
Series editor Carlos Otero
Essays on Syntax and Semantics
James Higginbotham
Partitions and Atoms of Clause Structure
Subjects, agreement, case and clitics Dominique Sportiche
The Syntax of Specifiers and Heads
Collected essays of Hilda J.Koopman Hilda J.Koopman
Configurations of Sentential Complementation
Perspectives from Romance languages Johan Rooryck
Essays in Syntactic Theory
Samuel David Epstein
On Syntax and Semantics
Richard K.Larson
Comparative Syntax and Language Acquisition
Luigi Rizzi
Comparative Syntax and
Language Acquisition
Luigi Rizzi
London and New York
First published 2000
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
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© 2000 Luigi Rizzi
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by
any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rizzi, Luigi, 1952–
Comparative syntax and language acquisition/Luigi Rizzi
p. cm.
Essays, seven of which were previously published in various sources,
1986–1997.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: Introduction—Null objects in Italian and the theory of
pro—Three issues in Romance dialectology—Some notes on Romance
cliticization—On chain formation—On the anaphor-agreement
effect—Argurnent-adjunct (a)symmetries—Direct perception,
government, and thematic sharing—Residual verb second and the
Wh criterion—The fine structure of the left periphery—Early null
subjects and root null subjects—Remarks on linguistic theory and
language development: the case of root infinitives.
ISBN 0-415-21549-8 (Print Edition) (HB)
1. Grammar, Comparative and general—Syntax. 2. Language
acquisition. I. Title
P291 .R57 2000
415–de21 99 058192
ISBN 0-203-46178-9 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-77002-1 (Adobe eReader Format)
To Adriana, Marco and Leonardo
Contents
Original publication details vii
1 Introduction 1
PART I Principles and parameters in the pronominal systems 16
2 Null objects in Italian and the theory of pro 17
3 Three issues in Romance dialectology 85
4 Some notes on Romance cliticization 1 02
PART II Locality 1 32
5 On chain formation 1 33
6 On the anaphor-agreement effect 1 69
7 Argument/adjunct (a)symmetries 1 86
8 Direct perception, government and thematic sharing 2 03
PART III Cartography 2 28
9 Residual verb second and the Wh Criterion 2 29
10 The fine structure of the left periphery 2 60
PART IV Acquisition 3 19
11 Early null subjects and root null subjects 3 20
12 Some notes on linguistic theory and language development: 3 43
the case of root infinitives
References 3 64
Author index 3 81
Subject index 3 86
Original publication details
Chapter 2 ‘Null objects in Italian and the theory of pro’ is reprinted from Linguistic
Inquiry, 17:501–57 by permission from MIT Press.
Chapter 5 ‘On chain formation’ is reprinted from H.Borer (ed.) The Syntax of
Pronominal Clitics, Syntax and Semantics 19, 1986:65–95, by permission from
Academic Press.
Chapter 6 ‘On the anaphor-agreement effect’ is reprinted from Rivista di
Linguistica 2, 1, 1990:27–42 by permission from Rivista di Linguistica, Pisa.
Chapter 9 ‘Residual verb second and the Wh Criterion’ is reprinted from
A.Belletti and L.Rizzi (eds) Parameters and Functional Heads, 1996:63–90, by
permission from Oxford University Press.
Chapter 10 ‘The fine structure of the left periphery’ is reprinted from L.
Haegeman (ed.) Elements of Grammar, 1997:281–337 by permission from
Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Chapter 11 ‘Early null subjects and root null subjects’ is reprinted from T.
Hoekstra and B.Schwartz (eds) Language Acquisition Studies in Generative
Grammar, 1994:151–76 by permission from John Benjamins Publishing
Company.
Chapter 12 ‘Some notes on linguistic theory and language development: the
case of root infinitives’ is reprinted from Language Acquisition, 3, 4, 1993/94:
371–93 by permission from Lawrence Erlbaum.
1
Introduction *
The essays collected in this volume are articulated around four major research
topics: the parametric approach to comparative syntax, with special reference to
the properties of the pronominal systems; the theory of locality in a
representational approach; the fine-grained study of structural representations,
leading to a detailed cartography of syntactic configurations; and the
theoretically-conscious study of language acquisition and language development.
The essays have been written at different times over a period of about fifteen
years. Rather then presenting them chronologically, I have opted for organizing
the presentation in four sections corresponding to the major research lines
mentioned above. In this introductory section, I would like to outline the
theoretical context of each topic, review some of the results achieved, and
discuss and speculate on possible developments.
1
The theory of parameters and comparative syntax
Up until the mid-seventies, particular grammars were conceived of as systems of
rules meeting some general constraints, but fundamentally specific to individual
languages. For instance, French causatives differed from English causatives in
that French syntax had certain transformational rules of causative formation
(Kayne 1975) which English lacked, certain Italian verbs allowed clitic climbing
and other phenomena disallowed in Contemporary French because Italian syntax
had a restructuring rule missing in Contemporary French (Rizzi 1976, 1978a),
etc. Universal Grammar (UG), the abstract theory of the human language
faculty, was conceived of as a grammatical metatheory constraining the form and
functioning of particular grammars (Chomsky 1973). On the one hand, UG
defined the format for possible grammatical rules; in terms of the cognitive
interpretation of UG as a theory of the initial cognitive state, it then defined the
‘search space’ for grammatical construction, the space of grammatical
possibilities within which the language learner had to build the particular rule
* Thanks are due to Marco Nicolis and Manola Salustri for editorial help.
2 INTRODUCTION
system generating the language he or she was exposed to. On the other hand, UG
defined the functioning of rule systems through such principles as A over A,
Subjacency and other theoretical entities intended to cover the locality
phenomena referred to as Island Constraints (Ross 1967) and other empirical
generalizations.
Two major advances took place in the course of the seventies which led to a
radically different picture around the end of the decade. The first was theoretical.
The sharpening of general conditions on rules made it possible to drastically
simplify the rule systems: in particular, the complex trasformational rules of
previous generative descriptions could be reduced to extremely simple rule
schemata such as ‘move category’, or ‘delete category’, with overgeneration
controlled by a very tight system of conditions operating on rule application, or
on the output (Chomsky 1976; Chomsky 1980; Chomsky and Lasnik 1977). The
second advance was empirical. The first large-scale attempts, within the
generative tradition, to carefully describe large fragments of languages different
from English revealed a fundamental underlying uniformity, much deeper than
an approach to individual grammars as language-specific rule systems would
have led one to expect (see much of the work on Romance syntax inspired by
Kayne 1975 and the earlier essays collected in Kayne 1984). At the same time,
relational grammarians were able to show that argument changing processes in a
wide variety of languages could be reduced to a small number of universal laws
expressed in terms of grammatical relations (see, for example, the essays
collected in Perlmutter 1983a).
These advances led to the Principles and Parameters approach. The possibility
of reducing (aspects of) cross linguistic variation to the fixation of parameters
was already hinted at, as an abstract possibility, in Chomsky (1975, republished
as Chapter 5 of Chomsky 1977b: 157); it was then discussed in connection with a
concrete case in Chomsky (1980) (written in 1978), and fully developed for the
first time in a series of seminars at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa in the
spring of 1979, then systematized in Chomsky (1981). Within this approach,
Universal Grammar ceases to be a higher order entity with respect to particular
grammars, and is conceived of as an integral component of them.
The grammar of a language consists of a lexicon and a computational
component specifying some choice points, or parameters; the computational
component is universal, except for the fixation of the parameters; the
computational component of a particular grammar, then, is UG plus a set of
parametric values. This simple approach to language uniformity and language
variation quickly manifested an extraordinary heuristic value: it prompted a
wealth of research on different language families bringing to light new
phenomena, and permitting a better grasp of known generalizations.
The first concrete case discussed in terms of the parametric approach was
related to the theory of locality. It was proposed that the reported cross-linguistic
variation in the extractability from a Wh Island and other embedded domains
could be accounted for by assuming that the set of bounding nodes, or
