Radical minimalism

This paper traces the theoretical evolution of generative syntax from Chomsky's initial formulation in Syntactic Structures (1957) through the contemporary Minimalist Program. The analysis examines how syntactic theory has undergone fundamental reconceptualizations while maintaining core commitments to formal precision, explanatory adequacy, and the biological basis of language. Through detailed examination of the Standard Theory, Extended Standard Theory, Government and Binding Theory, and Minimalism, this study demonstrates that theoretical progress has been driven by the tension between empirical coverage and conceptual elegance. The paper argues that while surface theoretical apparatus has changed dramatically, the underlying quest for explanatory adequacy regarding the human language faculty has remained constant. Key findings indicate that each theoretical stage has contributed lasting insights while addressing predecessors' limitations, culminating in minimalism's attempt to derive syntactic complexity from independently motivated cognitive and physical constraints.

This paper investigates three major post-Chomskyan frameworks-Distributed Morphology, Optimality Theory, and Nanosyntax-as responses to the limitations of generative grammar, particularly the Minimalist Program. By tracing their historical emergence, theoretical foundations, and empirical applications, the paper evaluates how these models have reshaped linguistic inquiry in morphology, phonology, and syntax. Through comparative analysis, it argues that these alternatives not only challenge core assumptions of Chomskyan grammar but also contribute to a pluralistic and interdisciplinary future for linguistic theory.

Departing from the concept of lexicon as a system and based on the Government and Binding Theory , the idiosyncratic pieces of information of nominal lexical structures aimed to be projected syntactically are identified. It is assumed the existence of a determining sintagma in which operations of quantification, of number attribution and, eventually, of genre take place. This is shaped in the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) to be exploited in systems of automatic treatment.

Dwa główne tematy artykułu to: projekcja "fokusu" w frazie werbalnej oraz sposób integracji okolicznika z tego typu frazą. Na początku postawionych jest kilka kwestii koncepcyjnych i empirycznych w stosunku do propozycji Hornsteina (2009) w tym zakresie. Uznaje się tam, że okoliczniki dodane są do struktury składniowej z użyciem prostej operacji "Połącz" (a nie operacji "Scal") i przez to są zawieszone "luźno" w strukturze. Jednak przy tym rozwiązaniu nie da się uniknąć niekorzystnej zasady "derywacyjnej antycypacji" (ang. look-ahead). Takie rozwiązanie jest też trudne do pogodzenia z realizacją funkcji okolicznika, którą jest modyfikacja wydarzenia wyrażonego przez czasownik. Dodatkowo, nie jest jasne dlaczego integracja w strukturze, konieczna dla przesunięcia, ma być warunkiem wystarczającym dla projekcji fokusu. Następnie przedstawiona jest klasyfikacja polskich konstrukcji z przesuniętą do przodu frazą czasownikową. Wyróżnia się...

Abstract

This article introduces the concept of Formal Syntactic Activation to explain how large language models (LLMs) generate language through syntactic structure rather than semantic intent. In this framework, language follows form—not meaning.

The paper examines the collapse of referential anchoring, the disappearance of the subject, and the emergence of syntactic legitimacy as the operative mode of coherence. It argues that grammatical fluency, not epistemic substance, increasingly defines the authority of AI-generated discourse.

Connecting with previous findings on passive constructions, impersonal grammar, and algorithmic enunciation, the article develops a formal and falsifiable theory of non-referential generation in artificial syntax. It situates this theory within broader debates on language, structure, and machine-generated meaning.



Resumen

Este artículo introduce el concepto de Activación Sintáctica Formal para explicar cómo los modelos de lenguaje generativo (LLMs) operan exclusivamente a través de la estructura sintáctica, sin recurrir a la intención semántica. En este marco, el lenguaje no sigue al significado: sigue a la forma.

El texto analiza el colapso del anclaje referencial, la desaparición del sujeto y el surgimiento de una legitimidad sintáctica que reemplaza la sustancia epistémica por fluidez gramatical. La autoridad discursiva en los sistemas generativos ya no proviene del contenido, sino de la continuidad formal.

Vinculando trabajos anteriores sobre estructura pasiva, gramática impersonal y enunciación algorítmica, se propone una teoría formal y falsable de generación no referencial, aplicable a la sintaxis artificial. Este enfoque redefine el lenguaje generado por IA más allá de las categorías expresivas humanas.

The origin and application of Recursion in the formal sciences is described, followed by a critical analysis of the adoption and adaptation of this notion in cognitive science, with a focus on linguistics and psychology. The conclusion argues against a widespread ...

1) purpose a. to conceive the phonology-phonetics interface as a regular instantiation of the modular architecture. b. to show that the application of modularity to this interface produces what is known as "phonetic interpretation" in Government Phonology ). c. to construe a consistent global picture where all interfaces respond to the same logic. That is, where linguistic-internal matters and competing theories are refereed by extra-linguistic constraints, in our case those imposed by cognitive science and modularity. d. this perspective is in line with minimalist and biolinguistic tenets: grammar-internal properties are shaped and explained by extra-grammatical, more generally cognitive constraints, typically relating to the interface(s) (third factor explanations, see Chomsky 2005).

to derive four axioms about roots in a principled way from the theory of Merge, thus reducing them to theorems THE FOUR AXIOMS: i) Roots have no grammatical features ii) Roots have no syntactic category iii) Roots are defined structurally, not lexically iv) Roots are merged lower than functional material THE THEORY OF MERGE: the very first instance of Merge (Primary Merge) combines a feature (set) from the Numeration with the null derivation, i.e. with the empty set THE GIST OF THE ANALYSIS: roots are inserted post-syntactically into the empty slots created by Primary Merge THEORETICAL CONSEQUENCES ! unified vocabulary insertion for functional and lexical vocabulary items ! roots are a specific kind of terminal node, not a specific kind of vocabulary item ! roots are featureless nodes and as a result, cannot move or project ! generalized, revised late insertion (pace Harley to appear). OVERVIEW 1 The explananda: four axioms about roots 2 Prerequisite for the analysis: asymmetric primary merge and the null derivation 3 Quick recap 4 The analysis: deriving the properties of roots 5 Theoretical consequences of the analysis 6 Conclusions

For the first Inter-Views we selected (morpho-)syntactic research, and asked 8 syntacticians, representing four approaches to the study of Romance linguistics, to answer our questions. The approaches we selected are Cartography, Distributed Morphology, Minimalism, and Nanosyntax. The scholars we interviewed are listed hereafter.

The biolinguistics research project as developed over several decades by theoretical linguists and researchers in cognitive science has intricate features of complexity as non-linearity alongside linearity besides genetically and computationally grounded characteristics.  Further human-subject-centric research as envisioned according to this research project, however, entails serious bioethical concerns at the conceptual and policy levels in the Indian context as well as globally.

Este estudio se enfoca en analizar los verbos modales deónticos presentes en dos libros de recetas escritos por mujeres en la Inglaterra del siglo XIX: “A Lady” (1818) y Beeton (1875). Se realiza un análisis contrastivo de cómo las autoras emplean estos verbos, comunes en textos instructivos como las recetas debido a su naturaleza prescriptiva. Los objetivos incluyen identificar los verbos modales deónticos, detectar similitudes o diferencias en su uso y observar posibles variaciones entre ambos textos. A pesar de los cambios significativos en la época, el papel tradicional de las mujeres como cuidadoras y curanderas persiste. La presentación contextualiza el siglo XIX y el papel de la mujer, introduciendo conceptos clave como género, tipo de texto y registro. Asimismo, se explora la naturaleza de los verbos modales y se define el término de modalidad, así como sus principales tipos. Posteriormente, se utiliza la metodología de lingüística de corpus con el Corpus of Women’s Instructive Texts in English (COWITE). En este análisis, se combina enfoques cuantitativos y cualitativos para examinar ocurrencias. Los resultados arrojan tanto similitudes como diferencias en el empleo de estos verbos modales, que parecen deberse a estilos lingüísticos diferentes entre las autoras.

El siguiente artículo estudia una serie de construcciones del español de la Argentina que involucran un uso no convencional de nombres propios (NPrs). Se trata de las secuencias Los + NPr (los Chomsky), hacer la gran NPr (hacer la gran Chomsky) y los verbos denominales terminados en –(e)ar con clítico marginal la (chomskyarla). Las construcciones se emplean para describir eventos o entidades que exhiben un comportamiento prototípico asociado a la entidad vinculada al NPr y presentan particularidades morfológicas, como la no obligatoriedad de la marcación de número en el nombre en los Chomsky(s) o la presencia del exponente /a/ en las otras dos estructuras. El trabajo ofrece una descripción y un análisis morfosintáctico de estas construcciones, a fin de explicar, a partir de las estructuras sintácticas propuestas, su comportamiento morfológico y el significado que tienen en común. Además, en el marco de un enfoque neoconstruccionista como lo es el de la Morfología Distribuida, nos proponemos contribuir a la discusión teórica acerca del rol de las raíces en la arquitectura de la gramática y del modo en que se interpretan no solo en función de su sintaxis sino también de factores de índole pragmático y contextuales.

Большое изменение начинается с малого: Прономинальные клитики в тексте древнерусских летописей XII-XV. вв. Аннотация В противоположность западно-и южнославянским языкам, современные восточнославянские языки не имеют энклитических форм местоимений. Однако в древнерусском языке употреблялось широкий набор таких форм. Они вышли из употребления в конце древнерусского периода, в XV-XVI вв. В статье рассматривается употребление энклитических местоимений в тексте пяти летописей XII-XV. вв., взятых из НКРЯ. Анализ сосредоточивается на частотность употребления энклитических форм, на синтаксическую позицию энклитик, на устройство цепочек энклитик и на аномальные структуры. В статье предлагается взгляд, согласно которому исчезновение прономинальных энклитических местоимений является не самостоятельным, обособленным от других языковых изменений процессом, а «побочным явлением» значительного исторического преобразования, разрушения видо-временной системы и следовательного ослабления категории Т.

This paper explores the use of bound forms in coordination constructions and ʔijjā and ʔijja in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA), respectively. Using the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2005) as a theoretical framework, the paper proposes that the use of bound forms in such constructions is ruled by a Phonetic-Form constraint that prohibits cliticization of a bound form onto another bound form, i.e. the combination of two bound forms does not result in a free form; hence it is blocked. The paper demonstrates that the use of ʔijjā and ʔijja in MSA and JA, respectively, is a direct consequence of this constraint, so that ʔijjā/ʔijja is a Phonetic-Form object used to serve as a lexical host of bound forms (cf. Fassi Fehri 1993). The use of ʔijjā/ʔijja is also shown to be prosodically ruled; it is prosodically dependent so that ʔijjā/ ʔijja should be a member of the prosodic unit which also includes the preceding word.

The paper discusses syntactic features of Slavic possessive clitics and Slavic constructions with socalled-Possessor Raising‖. I prove that only a minority of Slavic languages have true phrase-level (NP-level or DP-level) possessive clitics and arguing against a generalized syntactic account of all Slavic constructions with possessive operators. The weak aspects of the PR hypothesis are that it takes the mapping of syntax and possessive semantics to be iconic and the rules/principles of extracting a NP/DP-level possessive operator out of the NP/DP to be trivial. The analysis has shown that these assumptions are poorly justified. Slavic languages typically apply different case-marking for nonagreeing phrase-level possessive operators and non-agreeing clause-level possessive operators. A group of languages including Modern Russian lacks phrase-level possessive clitics. For this group the PR hypothesis cannot be retained. Most cases where the PR hypothesis has been proposed in previous Slavic studies do not conform to the definition of Raising as a syntactic operation, since the identity of structures with a clause-level or phrase-level possessive operator cannot be established. Such cases must be reanalyzed in terms of Possessive Shift, i.e., alternation of a true possessive construction with a NP/DP-level possessive element and its quasi-synonym, a pseudo-possessive construction with a case-marked verbal argument. 1 The paper is written with financial support from the Russian Ministry of Education and Culture, project 2012-1.2.1-12-000-3004-9859 «Models of Case Grammar and Natural Languages». The author is grateful to the audience of SLS-6 conference (Aix-en-Provence 2011) and, personally, to Steven Franks, Frank Gladney and Grigory Kreidlin for the valuable comments. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their criticism. All responsibility for shortcomings is my own.

The present paper explores the issue of framework bias through the analysis of two lines of study concerning language evolution, one framed by the Minimalist program and one by the proposal of Parallel Architecture of language. Framework bias, as proposed in this study, raises the question of the degree to which the theoretical framework chosen for a certain line of research will in luence the design of an experiment, the selection of data, and therefore the analysis and inal results. The studies presented in this paper tackle the same topic (language evolution) using the same parameters for research (gradual versus saltational evolution; continuation versus exaptation; and unique versus shared property) but reach significantly different conclusions because of their respective theoretical framework.

The starting point of this work is the notion of explanatory adequacy. After summarizing and analyzing the presentation that Chomsky gives of this notion in the first works of generative grammar, I consider the role that such notion has been playing in the construction of the theory of generative grammar and in the foundation of the Universal Grammar research program, focusing, in particular, on the last phase of generative grammar, i.e., minimalism.

En este trabajo se estudia la elipsis nominal del español desde los postulados generales de la Gramática Generativa (Chomsky, 1965, 1995) y la Teoría de la Identidad parcial (Saab, 2008, 2019) y, a partir de su explicación, se representa su alcance en una gramática computacional capaz no solo de identificar estas formaciones, sino también de reponer el correspondiente elemento nominal elidido. Si bien se muestra un componente computacional, el foco de atención es la estructura gramatical y cómo es un instrumento idóneo para resolver algunos de los problemas de la identificación automática de estas construcciones y otras similares. Ahora bien, la elipsis nominal no cuenta con un minucioso estudio como sí sucede con la elipsis verbal. Para comprobar la representación computacional de este fenómeno sintáctico se crearon en NooJ (Silberztein, 2005, 2016) dos herramientas: un diccionario electrónico y una gramática computacional. Ambas fueron evaluadas en un corpus de 423000 palabras pertenecientes al dominio médico. Es importante mencionar que esta gramática computacional no fue entrenada ni modificada en ningún corpus previo. En un barrido manual se identificaron 355 elipsis, de las cuales se logró detectar un total de 335 elipsis. Los resultados obtenidos fueron los siguientes: un 99,11 % de precisión, un 94,36 % de cobertura y un 96,68 % de medida f.

Since Bleam's (2000) initial claim that capturing clitic climbing patterns in Romance requires the descriptive power of set-local MCTAG (Weir, 1988), alternative approaches to relaxing tree-locality restrictions have been developed, including delayed tree-local MCTAG (Chiang and Scheffler, 2008), which, unlike set-local MCTAG, is weakly equivalent to standard TAG. This paper compares 2-delayed treelocal MCTAG with set-local MCTAG in terms of how well the two formalisms can account for the clitic climbing data. We confirm that 2-delay tree-local MCTAG has the formal expressivity to cover the data by proposing an explicit grammar to do so. However, we also find that the constraint on set locality is particularly well-suited for capturing these clitic climbing patterns. I.e., though globally less restrictive, set-local MCTAG appears to be restrictive in just the right way in this specific case.

fossils of language" (FFI2010-14955). We are grateful to two anonymous Biolinguistics reviewers for their comments and suggestions on this paper. 1 Lenneberg too was concerned with promoting nativism, as the following passage reveals: "There is, then, nothing unscientific about the claim that a species-specific behavior pattern, such as language, may well be determined by innate mechanisms" (Lenneberg 1967: 221).

This paper explores the use of bound forms in coordination constructions and ʔijjā and ʔijja in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA), respectively. Using the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2005) as a theoretical framework, the paper proposes that the use of bound forms in such constructions is ruled by a Phonetic-Form constraint that prohibits cliticization of a bound form onto another bound form, i.e. the combination of two bound forms does not result in a free form; hence it is blocked. The paper demonstrates that the use of ʔijjā and ʔijja in MSA and JA, respectively, is a direct consequence of this constraint, so that ʔijjā/ʔijja is a Phonetic-Form object used to serve as a lexical host of bound forms (cf. Fassi Fehri 1993). The use of ʔijjā/ʔijja is also shown to be prosodically ruled; it is prosodically dependent so that ʔijjā/ ʔijja should be a member of the prosodic unit which also includes the preceding word.

By resorting to recent results, we show that an isomorphism exist between linguistic features of the Minimalist Program and the quantum field theory formalism of condensed matter physics. Specific linguistic features which admit a representation in terms of the many-body algebraic formalism are the unconstrained nature of recursive Merge, the operation of the Labeling Algorithm, the difference between pronounced and un-pronounced copies of elements in a sentence and the build-up of the Fibonacci sequence in the syntactic derivation of sentence structures. The collective dynamical nature of the formation process of Logical Forms leading to the individuation of the manifold of concepts and the computational self-consistency of languages are also discussed.

This paper reconsiders so-called freezing effects within Chomsky’s (2004 and sub.) Phase Theory. I argue that freezing (or halting) should not be seen as the consequence of an exocentric {XP,YP} structure in which the heads of XP and YP share some feature (cf. Chomsky 2013, 2015) or as the invisibility of X’ projections (cf. Rizzi 2015). Instead, I submit that A-freezing (Chomsky’s 2000, 2001 Activity Condition) and A-bar freezing (Rizzi’s 2006 Criterial Freezing) should be dealt with by different principles: the former follows from an independently motivated rule of efficient computation (the application of cyclic Transfer; cf. Chomsky 2000, Uriagereka 1999), coupled with Labeling Theory (cf. Chomsky 2013, 2015), whereas the latter is simply syntactically vacuous. In line with previous proposals (cf. Gallego 2009, Epstein, Kitahara & Seely 2016), I claim that XPs in edge positions are not frozen in the narrow syntax (they can always move, unless affected by cyclic Transfer). Nevert...

There are many scientific problems generated by the multiple and conflicting alternative definitions of linguistic recursion and human recursive processing that exist in the literature. The purpose of this article is to make available to the linguistic community the standard mathematical definition of recursion and to apply it to discuss linguistic recursion. As a byproduct, we obtain an insight into certain "soft universals" of human languages, which are related to cognitive constructs necessary to implement mathematical reasoning, i.e. mathematical model theory.

Unlike most scientific disciplines, the origin of biolinguistics is so recent that, to a large extent, its history has been written by some of its main protagonists, and not by historians who have approached it from outside of the discipline, or that have done it long after the period of its development. Therefore, this brief summary of the history of biolinguistics is centrally based on the narratives of some of its protagonists, such as Noam Chomsky, Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, Lyle Jenkins or Tecumseh Fitch, among others. Thus, the only originality of this chapter will be the selection of topics considered and the emphasis on certain authors more than others.

Clitic climbing, i.e. the realization of one or more clitics in a syntactic constituent hierarchically higher than the clitics' licensing predicate, has been accounted for in terms of a restructuring approach. The embedded infinitive the clitics are extracted from has been assumed to be structurally deficient-that is, a bare VP. Due to the lack of projections above the lexical V-head, clitics escape the infinitival domain to get their morphosyntactic features licensed in the matrix clause. However, the predictions of the restructuring approach do not withstand a corpus linguistic examination and are falsified by empirical data of Czech and Polish. Clitic climbing cannot be adequately accounted for by syntax proper and alternative accounts have to be taken into consideration seriously. It will be proposed to exploit information structure as a feasible explanatory account of clitic climbing.

Los confictos sociales y políticos forman parte de cualquier monografía
bien documentada sobre la crisis de la República romana. Las dimensiones del proceso, la periodización precisa de su dinámica de cambio y las categorías empleadas para conceptualizar esta parcela de la historia alimentan el debate historiográfco especializado. En este sentido, el estudio de la violencia aparece como una variable dependiente de la interrelación de factores económicos, sociales, culturales y políticos, pero pocas veces concita una refexión particular y sostenida como la que puede atribuirse, por ejemplo, a los historiadores Andrew Lintot y Antonio Duplá. La mayor parte de los investigadores reduce el estatus de la violencia a una mera consecuencia de las transformaciones ocurridas en
la sociedad romana por la adquisición del imperio territorial, el incremento de la desigualdad y la militarización. Con notables excepciones en la bibliografía, la violencia resulta un componente esencial de las narrativas históricas, aunque predominan explicaciones funcionalistas. El avance en la formulación de nuevos problemas y modelos explicativos sobre la República romana tardía impone una necesaria revisión de las hipótesis vigentes. En este sentido, las publicaciones recientes apelan a conceptos y enfoques renovados para comprender las dimensiones materiales, intelectuales y simbólicas de la violencia. Una tríada que se articula en el libro de Chantal Gabrielli, Res Publica Servanda Est…, que comentamos a continuación. La autora problematiza la relación entre práctica política y violencia en la refexión historiográfca antigua y moderna. De este
modo, analiza cómo las narrativas históricas sobre las revueltas de los hermanos Tiberio y Cayo Graco modelaron la comprensión de la crisis del sistema político, planteando un diálogo presente-pasado que intervino en la diatriba intelectual de la época y condicionó la reconstrucción histórica moderna.

Andrej A. Zaliznjak's recent book, Drevnerusskie ènklitiki, explains the need for a book about Old Russian enclitics by stating that while the enclitics of the South and West Slavic languages have attracted great interest, those of Old Russian have been largely ignored. Very little literature on the subject exists, and Zaliznjak cites only two studies, both dating from 1935: Gunnarsson's study of sę and Jakobson's small article about the Slavic enclitics as a whole. In Zaliznjak's opinion, this lack of interest has been caused by the absence of good sources for colloquial Old Russian speech, until the discovery of the Novgorod birch bark documents in 1951. The author also notes that histories of the Russian language do not contain chapters on the enclitics of Old Russian. Thus, the present study has the goal of providing the first modern, comprehensive study of Old Russian enclitics, in which the sources of Old Russian colloquial speech are fully taken into account. In addition to the author's use of the birch bark documents, he also makes extensive use of all the instances of direct speech, found in the Kievan letopis', since this also provides good evidence about colloquial uses of Old Russian. This book is intended as a complete and comprehensive expansion of the author's earlier 1993 article on the birch bark documents. It also draws from the author's 1985 book on the history of Slavic accentuation. The author makes the important statement that the goal of the book is not the comparison of Old Russian enclitics with those of other Indo-European languages or with the South and West Slavic languages. It appears that this statement was made for the purpose of explaining the absence of a discussion of the many recent studies of Slavic enclitics which have appeared in recent years, since it has become a topic of great interest to Slavists. At first glance, it seemed surprising that the references about Slavic enclitics are little more than the two 1935 sources mentioned above. One does not find such recent work as the Handbook of Slavic Clitics (Franks and King, 2000), or the large number of clitic references that one can find in their bibliography (pp. 377-392). One might have expected a bit more about the current literature on the subject, although Zaliznjak's position is understandable. After all, his book is the first to bring the enclitics of the birch bark documents and many other Old Russian manuscripts into the field of scholarly study. As the author mentions, the study of clitics has both phonological and syntactic aspects. Further, he states that "practically the only Old Russian manuscript from which one could directly extract information about enclitic accentuation" (p. 11) is the Čudov New Testament, due to the fact that it is accented. Therefore, in order to utilize the birch bark documents and other colloquial sources, it is necessary to use unaccented sources. Thus, accentological analysis plays only a secondary role, and the syntactic position of clitics is the main basis for judgements about their behavior. In fact, the central concept of this entire book is the explanation and prediction of those instances of Old Russian enclitics which do not conform to Wackernagel's Law, which specifies that enclitics must occupy the second position in a sentence. Therefore, every possible instance of a non-second place location of enclitics is analyzed by the author on the basis of many parameters, which constitute the chapters of this book. I will now give a brief account of the book's contents and how each chapter relates to the main theme of explaining how deviations from Wackernagel's Law might be explained. The first chapter, devoted to the main rules of enclitic behavior, introduces the most important concepts and parameters which are in constant use throughout the book. If one looks at enclitic order (i.e. "ranking"), the first five ranks of enclitics to occur-že, li, bo, ti (not the dative pronoun), and by-are considered to be the older and more stable group, and also can be called the "strong clitics" (p. 51). Conversely, the latter three ranks (dative pronouns mi, si, ti, accusative pronouns mę, sę, tę, and the copula) are the "weak clitics," although there is a descending scale of strength within each group.

Matrix syntax is a model of syntactic relations in language, which grew out of a desire to understand chains. The purpose of this paper is to explain its basic ideas to a linguistics audience, without entering into too many formal details (for which cf. Orús et al. 2017). The resulting mathematical structure resembles some aspects of quantum mechanics and is well-suited to describe linguistic chains. In particular, sentences are naturally modeled as vectors in a Hilbert space with a tensor product structure, built from 2x2 matrices belonging to some specific group. Curiously, the matrices the system employs are simple extensions of customary representations of the major parts of speech, as [±N, ±V] objects.

Este artículo examina la teoría temática, un módulo en el marco del modelo gramatical de Principios y Parámetros. Por esta razón, se considera necesario considerar los niveles de representación, el léxico, las categorías léxicas y funcionales, la teoría temática, el criterio- Ө, los papeles o roles temáticos y la estructura o red argumental de los predicados. También menciona algunas ventajas y dificultades de considerar roles temáticos que planteó Bosque (2009), y comenta la propuesta restrictiva de Guillermo Lorenzo González (1992).

This paper explores the use of bound forms in coordination constructions and ʔijjā and ʔijja in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA), respectively. Using the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2005) as a theoretical framework, the paper proposes that the use of bound forms in such constructions is ruled by a Phonetic-Form constraint that prohibits cliticization of a bound form onto another bound form, i.e. the combination of two bound forms does not result in a free form; hence it is blocked. The paper demonstrates that the use of ʔijjā and ʔijja in MSA and JA, respectively, is a direct consequence of this constraint, so that ʔijjā/ʔijja is a Phonetic-Form object used to serve as a lexical host of bound forms (cf. Fassi Fehri 1993). The use of ʔijjā/ʔijja is also shown to be prosodically ruled; it is prosodically dependent so that ʔijjā/ ʔijja should be a member of the prosodic unit which also includes the preceding word.

In this article, we trace the diachronic phases of so-called genitive-dative syncretism in Old Bulgarian, a phenomenon which marks the beginning of the process of disintegration of the Case system in the history of Bulgarian. We base our research on a corpus study (comprising the texts of Codex Marianus, Codex Zographensis and Codex Suprasliensis) and we show, after a careful examination of the available syntactic positions for the Genitive and the Dative, that the main reason for the Dative shift in Old Bulgarian was the so-called External Possessive construction (also known as dativus sympatheticus) which allowed the dative to be interpreted outside the noun phrase but with reference to an inalienable possessive element inside the noun phrase. We discuss each stage of the functional reanalysis leading to the establishment of noun phrase internal dative possessives, and in particular the role of the emerging clitic pronouns and their second position syntactic behaviour as a main tr...

The paper discusses issues in the grammar of Case marking in the DP by focusing on two interrelated puzzles in the syntax of Bulgarian nominalizations. The first puzzle concerns the ban on strong pronouns to act as DP-internal subjects. We argue that this is due to a morphological Case conflict, and we also discuss some historical considerations bearing on the loss of the genitive in Bulgarian. The second puzzle we discuss concerns DPs headed by an object nominal which show no traces of a Case conflict. The paper offers some considerations bearing on the genitive-dative Case syncretism in the history of Bulgarian. * We dedicate this paper to Catherine Rudin, whom we admire very much as a linguist and as a person. We would like to thank Steven Franks for discussing various relevant issues with us and an anonymous reviewer for highly valuable comments, which have helped us improve the paper. For the requirements of the Italian academic system Iliyana Krapova takes responsibility for sections 1, 2, and 3 and Guglielmo Cinque for sections 4 and 5.

Departing from the concept of lexicon as a system and based on the Government and Binding Theory , the idiosyncratic pieces of information of nominal lexical structures aimed to be projected syntactically are identified. It is assumed the existence of a determining sintagma in which operations of quantification, of number attribution and, eventually, of genre take place. This is shaped in the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) to be exploited in systems of automatic treatment.

In Chomsky 2015 it is proposed that raising of a wh phrase from subject position is not possible unless C is deleted in the Narrow Syntax (NS), as seen in the that/Comp-trace Effect (C-tE). Evidence presented here indicates that the raising of a subject may allow and even require the overt presence of C, pointing toward the conclusions that raising a subject is not related to C deletion, and that all wh subjects raise. The alternative considered here is that the locus of phenomena such as the C-tE may be the Sensory-motor (SM) component rather than NS. Taking anti-Comptrace phenomena into account, there appears to be a requirement that a subject extraction must be phonetically marked ('Subject Extraction Marking'-SEM), either by the subject itself being overt, or by the presence of an overt C. This paper proposes a possible SM analysis consisting of rules that account for the complexities of spelling out that including Doubly-filled Comp, the C-tE, and SEM.

This paper gives an account of inalienable possession (IP) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) that involves semantics and pragmatics, in addition to the expected morpho-syntactic factors. It argues that colloquial BPIP has moved away from the standard Romance pattern of manifesting IP via definite article, accompanied by a dative clitic under certain semantic conditions concerning the nature of the event. The data, consisting of narrative from two novels and a set of interviews with semi-literate subjects, are intended to represent both extremes and the midpoint of the formality continuum. The 3 corpora show the drift from a clitic-based syntax in the most conservative register to a nearly clitic-free situation at the colloquial extreme, where only prototype semantics reveals any codally relevant IP correlates. The link between possessor and possessum, co-designation, is shown to be inferential rather than syntactic, and satisfies the criteria for GRICE'S generalized conversational implicature.

When and how it emerged and its social evolution By TELIS FATSEAS This is going to be a very brief work. I intend to show that RECURSION a) is a relatively very recent invention of the language, b) is NOT subject to biology as genes (such as FOXP2) and the like, c) concerns the BRAIN ORGANIZATION, NOT the brain biology. Because of this it concerns only SOCIAL CONDITIONS and SOCIAL ORGANIZATION. This summary has been extracted-though with changes-from my book (not yet published) The Enslaved Body, the Fall of the Female Element (© Telis Fatseas, 2020/2022/2023). Note that the analysis I am going to undertake on the issue 'LANGUAGE' in general and 'RECURSION' in particular will follow neither the terminology nor the methods the linguists use. What I am exclusively interested in are the social transformations that result from the social fragmentation due to the erratic distribution of values. The social transformations are being crystallized as continuous CHANGES IN THE LANGUAGE, this way causing enormous psychological shifts: this aspect of language is being neglected systematically.

Biolinguistics aims to shed light on the specifically biological nature of human language, focusing on five foundational questions: (1) What are the properties of the language phenotype? (2) How does language ability grow and mature in individuals? (3) How is language put to use? (4) How is language implemented in the brain? (5) What evolutionary processes led to the emergence of language? These foundational questions are used here to frame a discussion of important issues in the study of language, exploring whether our linguistic capacity is the result of direct selective pressure or due to developmental or biophysical constraints, and assessing whether the neural/computational components entering into language are unique to human language or shared with other cognitive systems, leading to a discussion of advances in theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, comparative animal behavior and psychology, genetics/genomics, disciplines that can now place these longstanding questions ...

Biolinguistics aims to shed light on the specifically biological nature of human language, focusing on five foundational questions: (1) What are the properties of the language phenotype? (2) How does language ability grow and mature in individuals? (3) How is language put to use? (4) How is language implemented in the brain? (5) What evolutionary processes led to the emergence of language? These foundational questions are used here to frame a discussion of important issues in the study of language, exploring whether our linguistic capacity is the result of direct selective pressure or due to developmental or biophysical constraints, and assessing whether the neural/computational components entering into language are unique to human language or shared with other cognitive systems, leading to a discussion of advances in theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, comparative animal behavior and psychology, genetics/genomics, disciplines that can now place these longstanding questions ...

This paper explores the use of bound forms in coordination constructions and ʔijjā and ʔijja in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA), respectively. Using the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2005) as a theoretical framework, the paper proposes that the use of bound forms in such constructions is ruled by a Phonetic-Form constraint that prohibits cliticization of a bound form onto another bound form, i.e. the combination of two bound forms does not result in a free form; hence it is blocked. The paper demonstrates that the use of ʔijjā and ʔijja in MSA and JA, respectively, is a direct consequence of this constraint, so that ʔijjā/ʔijja is a Phonetic-Form object used to serve as a lexical host of bound forms (cf. Fassi Fehri 1993). The use of ʔijjā/ʔijja is also shown to be prosodically ruled; it is prosodically dependent so that ʔijjā/ ʔijja should be a member of the prosodic unit which also includes the preceding word.

Th e authors are interested in the semantic (= not formal) evolution of the dative case relationship. Th ey carry their analysis in the framework of the anthropocentric case theory and argue that the referent of the dative NP (NP D) is the second (in the communicative hierarchy) human protagonist of the event (benefi ciens and/or experiencer). Also the D ~ G opposition is analyzed on the semantic plane, with the referent of the NP G interpreted as the possessor in contexts when the possessor-possessum relation is realized at the level of a NP, and not at the sentential level. Th e syntactic, adverbal vs. adnominal position is understood as the basic, defi nitional diff erence between NP D and NP G at the formal plane.