Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Minimalism and Darwin's Problem
- 2 Deriving c-command
- 3 Labels, recursion and movement
- 4 Some thoughts on adjunction
- 5 The emerging picture: Basic operations, FL and the Minimalist Program
- 6 Stop AGREEing! Keep Moving!
- 7 Conclusions, consequences and more questions
- References
- Index
3 - Labels, recursion and movement
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Minimalism and Darwin's Problem
- 2 Deriving c-command
- 3 Labels, recursion and movement
- 4 Some thoughts on adjunction
- 5 The emerging picture: Basic operations, FL and the Minimalist Program
- 6 Stop AGREEing! Keep Moving!
- 7 Conclusions, consequences and more questions
- References
- Index
Summary
Introduction: Merge and Concatenate
No introductory course in linguistics is complete without the observation that linguistic objects – words, phrases, sentences – are made up of elements combined in a hierarchical fashion. “Words in a sentence are not like beads on a string!” we announce. Words in a sentence nest; they are not a simple linear concatenation of elements. More technically, linguistic objects display recursive embedding, not a simple linear order; sentences have tops and bottoms as well as lefts and rights.
One of the central tasks of modern linguistics has been to characterize the nature of this nesting. Within syntax, the consensus opinion is that recursion is the province of the phrase structure component of the grammar. Here rules can apply repeatedly without limit to nest categories within one another. As it is possible to embed a category of type X within a category of the same type, recursion emerges and hierarchically nested structures emerge without limit. The recursive trick is encapsulated in (1), where a phrase of type X is contained within a phrase of type X.
(1) [XP … XP …]
The varying generative accounts of phrase structure all allow structures like (1). Theories of the Aspects vintage generate such structures using rules like (2).
(2)
a. S → NP VP
b. VP → V (NP) (S)
c. NP → Det N (PP) (S)
d. PP → P NP
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Theory of SyntaxMinimal Operations and Universal Grammar, pp. 53 - 80Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008