A Feature-Based Syntax of Functional Categories

The Structure, Acquisition and Specific Impairment of Functional Systems

Michael Hegarty

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9783110184136
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110895407
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book develops ideas of Minimalist syntax to derive functional categories from the partially-ordered features expressed by functional elements, thereby dispensing with functional categories as primitives of the theory. It generalizes attempts to do this in the literature, while drawing significant empirical consequences from general constraints formulated to block overgeneration. The resulting theory of the construction of functional categories is applied to various problems in syntactic analysis and comparative and historical syntax, including variation across Germanic languages in patterns of verb-second and in the occurrence of expletive subjects in existential constructions, verb positions in Old and Middle English, problems regarding the placement of clitic pronouns in Romance languages and Modern Greek, and some previously unexamined structures of reduced clause coordination in colloquial English. Facts from early stages of the acquisition of syntax are shown to follow from the mechanisms for the projection of functional features as functional categories, exercised before all of the features for a language, along with their ordering and feature co-occurrence restrictions, have been acquired. It is observed that child acquisition of functional elements exhibits successive developmental stages, each characterized by the number of clausal functional elements which can be represented together within a clause. This, and facts regarding the lag in development of functional categories by children with specific language impairment, are shown to be not entirely reducible to limitations in working memory or processing capacity, but to depend in part on the growth of representational resources for the projection of functional categories.

Table of contents

• Chapter 1: Introduction
• 1. Aims and approach
• 2. Elements of Minimalist syntax
• 3. Feature-based projection of functional categories
• Chapter 2: A feature-based derivation of functional heads
• 1. The syntactic utility of functional heads
• 2. Derived functional heads
• 2.1. Derived functional heads in the literature
• 2.2. Feature matrices and constraints
• 2.3. Conclusion
• Notes
• Chapter 3: Germanic verb-second and expletive subjects
• 1. Patterns of Germanic verb-second
• 2. Expletive subjects
• 3. Verb-second and the Top domain in Old English and Middle English
• 3.1. Early English verb-second
• 3.2. A feature-based account of Old and Middle English verb-second
• 3.3. Middle English dialects and language change
• 3.4. Streamlining accounts of Old English word order below the TOPIC domain
• Notes
• Chapter 4: Aspects of clitic placement and clitic climbing
• 1. Head movement accounts of clitic placement
• 2. Verb and clitic movement
• 2.1. Mechanics of clitic placement in Italian and Spanish
• 2.2. Clitic placement in French
• 2.3. Imperatives
• 2.4. The orders of multiple object clitics in Modern Greek
• 3. Problems with clitic climbing in a feature-based syntax
• 4. A feature-based approach to clitic climbing
• 4.1. Restructuring
• 4.2. Mechanics of clitic climbing with feature-derived functional categories
• 4.3. Some properties of clitic climbing
• 4.4. Other accounts of clitic climbing
• 4.5. Clitic climbing out of finite clauses in Salentino
• 5. Conclusion
• Notes
• Chapter 5: Tenseless clauses and coordination
• 1. Accusative subject conjuncts
• 1.1. Properties of the accusative subject conjunct construction
• 1.2. The structure of coordination in the ASC construction
• 1.3. The internal structure of the ASC clause
• 2. Small clause complements of perception verbs
• 2.1. The ASC-like structure of “Bare Infinitive” complements
• 2.2. Higginbotham’s (1983) account
• Notes
• Chapter 6: The acquisition of functional features
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Preliminaries
• 2.1. Feature projection versus functional category adjunction
• 2.2. The present study
• 3. Results
• 3.1. Peter
• 3.2. Nina
• 3.3. Naomi
• 4. Discussion and conclusion
• Notes
• Chapter 7: The acquisition of adult functional categories
• 1. Theories and predictions
• 1.1. Strong continuity accounts
• 1.2. Radford’s maturational theory
• 1.3. Induction
• 1.4. Bottom-up structure building accounts
• 1.5. Feature-based theory of functional categories
• 1.6. Processing capacity, working memory, and phrase structure complexity
• 2. Procedures
• 2.1. Counting functional categories
• 2.2. Size normalization and nominative subject filtering
• 2.3. A measure of phrase structure complexity
• 2.4 Reliability
• 3. Results
• 3.1. Peter
• 3.2. Nina
• 3.3. Naomi
• 3.4. Summary
• 4. Discussion of results
• 4.1. The development of the adult functional category system
• 4.2. Non-adult feature matrices
• 5. Structure building approaches to the acquisition of functional categories
• 5.1. Guilfoyle and Noonan
• 5.2. Vainikka
• 5.3. Summary
• 6. A new picture of maturation
• 6.1. On the maturation of representational resources
• 6.2. Minimal functional projection and the maturation of minimal functional structure
• 7. Results of studies of functional category acquisition in other languages
• 7.1. The growth of functional categories
• 7.2. Feature ordering and feature co-occurrence restrictions
• Notes
• Chapter 8: The representation of functional categories as a factor in Specific Language Impairment
• 1. Theories and predictions
• 1.1. Deficits in agreement
• 1.2. Extended optional infinitives
• 1.3. Deficits in implicit rules
• 1.4. Impoverished inventories of functional elements
• 1.5. Feature-based theory
• 2. Method
• 3. Results
• 3.1. Results for children with SLI
• 3.2. Comparison with language-matched ND children
• 4. Discussion
• 5. Conclusion
• Notes
• Chapter 9: Conclusion
• Appendix
• References
• Index of names
• Index of subjects