Table Of ContentMinimalism and Beyond
Language Faculty and Beyond
Internal and External Variation in Linguistics
Language Faculty and Beyond (LFAB) focuses on research that contributes to a deeper
understanding of the properties of languages as a result of the Language Faculty and
its interface with other domains of the mind/brain. While the series will pay particular
attention to the traditional tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy, the
series will also address issues such as the level of linguistic design, through new lines
of inquiry often referred to as ‘physiological linguistics’ or ‘biolinguistics’. LFAB aims
to publish studies from the point of view of internal and external factors which bear on
the nature of micro- and macro-variation as, for example, understood in the minimalist
approach to language.
For an overview of all books published in this series, please see
http://benjamins.com/catalog/lfab
Editors
Kleanthes K. Grohmann Pierre Pica
University of Cyprus CNRS, Paris
Advisory Board
Paola Benincà Anders Holmberg
University of Padova, Italy University of Newcastle, UK
Cedric Boeckx Lyle Jenkins
ICREA/University of Barcelona, Spain Biolinguistics Institute, Cambridge, USA
Guglielmo Cinque Richard K. Larson
University of Venice, Italy Stony Brook University, USA
Noam Chomsky Andrew Ira Nevins
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University College London, UK
Cambridge, USA
Alain Rouveret
Stephen Crain University of Paris VII, France
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
Esther Torrego
Marcel den Dikken University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA
CUNY Graduate Center, New York, USA
Anna Papafragou
Naama Friedmann University of Delaware, Newark, USA
Tel Aviv University, Israel
Akira Watanabe
University of Tokyo, Japan
Volume 11
Minimalism and Beyond. Radicalizing the interfaces
Edited by Peter Kosta, Steven L. Franks, Teodora Radeva-Bork and Lilia Schürcks
Minimalism and Beyond
Radicalizing the interfaces
Edited by
Peter Kosta
Universität Potsdam
Steven L. Franks
Indiana University, Bloomington
Teodora Radeva-Bork
Universität Potsdam
Lilia Schürcks
Universität Potsdam
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Minimalism and Beyond : Radicalizing the interfaces / Edited by Peter Kosta, Steven L.
Franks, Teodora Radeva-Bork and Lilia Schürcks.
p. cm. (Language Faculty and Beyond, issn 1877-6531 ; v. 11)
The present volume contains contributions based on a workshop which took place at
Universität Potsdam from 3-6 October 2011.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Minimalist theory (Linguistics) 2. Grammar, Comparative and general.
3. Linguistics--Research. I. Kosta, P. (Peter) editor of compilation. II. Franks,
Steven, editor of compilation. III. Radeva-Bork, Teodora, editor of compilation.
IV. Schürcks, Lilia, editor of compilation.
P158.28.M564 2014
415’.0182--dc23 2014009595
isbn 978 90 272 0828 6 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 7006 1 (Eb)
© 2014 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
Preface 1
List of contributors 5
I. Minimalism: Quo Vadis?
A program for the Minimalist Program 9
Norbert Hornstein and William Idsardi
II. Exploring features in syntax
On feature interpretability and inheritance 37
Marcel den Dikken
On the need for formal features in the narrow syntax 56
Michael Putnam and Antonio Fábregas
Adjunct Control and edge features 79
Jairo Nunes
On the uninterpretability of interpretable features 109
Hedde Zeijlstra
The Merge Condition: A syntactic approach to selection 130
Susi Wurmbrand
III. Radicalizing the interfaces
Chains in Minimalism 169
Roger Martin and Juan Uriagereka
Multiattachment syntax, “Movement” effects, and Spell-Out 195
Steven Franks
Flavors of movement: Revisiting the A/A′ distinction 236
Peter Kosta and Diego Gabriel Krivochen
vi Table of contents
Minimalism and I-Morphology 267
Anna Maria Di Sciullo
A minimalist approach to roots 287
Phoevos Panagiotidis
Computations at the interfaces in child grammar 304
Teodora Radeva-Bork
Intensionality, grammar, and the sententialist hypothesis 315
Wolfram Hinzen, Michelle Sheehan and Ulrich Reichard
What is and what is not problematic about the T-model 350
Natalia Slioussar
Regarding the Third Factor: Arguments for a CLASH model 363
Juan Uriagereka
The role of arbitrariness from a minimalist point of view 392
Manfred Bierwisch
Index 417
Preface
It has been two decades since the 1993 publication of Noam Chomsky’s A minimalist
program for linguistic theory (MIT occasional papers in linguistics no. 1. Cambridge,
MA: Distributed by MIT Working Papers in Linguistics), which set a new and chal-
lenging agenda for generative grammar. The job of grammar is in its essence to relate
form and meaning, enabling linguistic tokens to be translated into conceptual struc-
tures, and vice versa. While this simple fact was recognized as early as 1965 by the
Russian linguists A. Žolkovsky, I. Mel’čuk, and Ju. Apresjan in their “Meaning–Text
Model,” as has been usually the case, it took Chomsky’s pronouncement to set the ball
rolling among mainstream syntacticians. And of course, the Minimalist focus has on
the whole been very different, posing far reaching questions about the nature of the
language faculty rather than tackling the minutiae of relating the sensori-motor and
conceptual-intensional interfaces. What Minimalism asked us to consider is instead
the idea that the human language faculty is the optimal solution to the interface prob-
lem. It is in this sense that Minimalism defined a “program” for thinking about how
language might work rather than a model which can be applied to data sets.
Sadly, the discipline of generative syntax has moved far away not only from the
excitement of the Transformational–Generative period in the 1960’s and 1970’s, but
also from the sense of a coherent framework which prevailed with the Government–
Binding framework of the 1980’s. Although time will tell whether the loss of the
centrality of syntax is a good or bad thing, it seems to us that these changes were in-
evitable. For sociological and economic reasons, the practice of linguistics has become
much more applied, so that the questions and ideas that emerge under Minimalism
strike many as esoteric at best. But also likely is that the Minimalist program was
doomed from the start, in that its point of departure is the fantastic supposition that
the supreme engineer must have valued elegance and parsimony above all else in de-
signing our faculty of language. But biology does not work this way: living organ-
isms are clunky and imperfect, they avail themselves of multiple solutions to the same
problem, they suffer from accidental design flaws and randomness. So we do not ex-
pect to discover that human grammar is the optimal way for form and meaning to
talk to each other. Yet presenting the question as Minimalism does, by eschewing all
that is not, in Chomsky’s oft-cited phraseology, a “virtual conceptual necessity,” we are
able to step back from the baroque GB architecture and ask about each piece: “Does it
follow from more overarching consideratons”; “Do we need it?”; and “What happens
without it?”
2 Preface
The present volume contains contributions based on a workshop which took place
at Universität Potsdam from 3–6 October 2011. In our original plan, defined by the
question “The Minimalist Program: Newborn, Reborn, or Stillborn?”, we described the
goals of a proposed two-day workshop as follows:
“The so-called “minimalist” program is a trend in recent generative syntax to sub-
ject to critical scrutiny — and, if possible, eliminate — all constructs that are not vir-
tually conceptually necessary. Since the minimal task of syntax is to mediate between
form (what we say and hear) and meaning (what we intend or understand), the ques-
tion is to what extent all aspects of our model of syntax derive from the bare output
conditions imposed by these conceptually essential interfaces with form and meaning.
More generally, one can ask about the overall architecture of such a grammar: What
levels of representation does a viable minimalist grammar need to have?; How are
syntactic representations constructed?; and How are these representations interpreted
at the interfaces? The purpose of the proposed workshop is to bring together scholars
concerned with these broader issues, but who are also engaged in providing detailed
analysis to specific linguistic problems and who work on a variety of languages, in
order to explore new ways of understanding the organization of grammar and the
workings of language.”
The workshop itself — by then called “The Minimalist Program: Quo Vadis?
Newborn, Reborn, or Stillborn?” — expanded to include the following invited speak-
ers: Marcel den Dikken, Norbert Hornstein, Richard Kayne, Jairo Nunes, Uli Sauerland,
Anna-Maria di Sciullo, and Juan Uriagereka. All of these except Kayne and Sauerland
eventually contributed to the volume. There were many additional participants in the
workshop, some presenting papers and others commenting on the invited talks. In
addition to ourselves and the afore-mentioned invited speakers, the eventual program
included: Naoyuki Akaso, Andrei Antonenko, Markus Bader, Mariana Bandeira, Lena
Baunaz, Manfred Bierwisch, Michael Diercks, Alex Drummond, Gisbert Fanselow,
Ángel J. Gallego, Hans-Martin Gärtner, Francesco Grande, Tomoko Haraguchi, Peter
Herbeck, Wolfram Hinzen, Toru Ishii, Elena Kireva, Marjo van Koppen, Diego Gabriel
Krivochen, Renato Lacerda, Roger Martin, Mihaela Marchis, Alexandra Motut, Kenji
Oda, Dennis Ott, Phoevos Panagiotidis, Michael Putnam, Ulrich Reichard, Michelle
Sheehan, Natalia Slioussar, Melita Stavrou, Luka Szucsich, Scott C. Thomas, Andreas
Trotzke, and Hedde Zeijlstra. With the participation of such a diverse group of schol-
ars, the resulting workshop was a stimulating and successful forum for exchange of
ideas. While only some participants ending up submitting papers to this volume, we
thank all of you for your contributions to the event itself. We also acknowledge here
those individuals who reviewed the submissions to the volume for their very helpful
suggestions about improving the papers. To preserve anonymity we do not list the
reviewers here, but you know who you are and how much we appreciate your feedback
on earlier drafts of the papers published in these pages.
Finally, we dedicate the volume itself to the memory of Willy Schürcks, beloved
husband of Lilia Schürcks and much admired friend of Steven Franks and Peter Kosta.
Preface 3
Willy passed away years before his time, and a day does not go by when we do not
think of him and missed his buoyant spirit, his kindness and good humor. Wherever
you are, Willy, look down upon us and smile.
The Editors Potsdam, Bloomington, December 2013
