Aims

This book has two main aims, reflected in its title and subtitle. The first is to provide an intensive introduction to recent work in syntactic theory (more particularly to how the computational component operates within the model of grammar assumed in recent work within the framework of Chomsky's Minimalist Program). The second is to provide a description of a range of phenomena in English syntax, making use of minimalist concepts and assumptions wherever possible. The book can be seen as a successor to (or updated version of) my (1997a) book Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English. There is quite a lot of duplication of material between the earlier book and this one (particularly in the first few chapters), though the present book also contains substantial new material (e.g. on agreement, case, split projections and phases), and the analysis of many phenomena presented in this book differs from that in its predecessor (agreement being handled in terms of a feature-matching rather than a feature-checking framework, for example).

Key features

The book is intended to be suitable both for people with only minimal grammatical knowledge, and for people who have already done quite a bit of syntax but want to know something (more) about Minimalism. It is not historicist or comparative in orientation, and hence does not presuppose knowledge of earlier or alternative models of grammar. It is written in an approachable style, avoiding unnecessary complexity.

Overview

In broad terms, this book is concerned with aspects of grammar. Grammar is traditionally subdivided into two different but inter-related areas of study – morphology and syntax. Morphology is the study of how words are formed out of smaller units (called morphemes), and so addresses questions such as ‘What are the component morphemes of a word like antidisestablishmentarianism, and what is the nature of the morphological operations by which they are combined together to form the overall word?’ Syntax is the study of the way in which phrases and sentences are structured out of words, and so addresses questions like ‘What is the structure of a sentence like What's the president doing? and what is the nature of the grammatical operations by which its component words are combined together to form the overall sentence structure?’ In this chapter, we take a look at the approach to syntax adopted by Chomsky.

Universal Grammar

Within traditional grammar, the syntax of a language is described in terms of a taxonomy (i.e. classificatory list) of the range of different types of syntactic structures found in the language. The central assumption underpinning syntactic analysis in traditional grammar is that phrases and sentences are built up of a series of constituents (i.e. syntactic units), each of which belongs to a specific grammatical category and serves a specific grammatical function.

Overview

In this chapter, we take a closer look at the syntax of agreement. We begin by outlining the claim made by Chomsky in recent work that agreement involves a relation between a probe and a goal (though it should be noted that the term goal in this chapter is used in an entirely different way from the term goal which was used to denote the thematic role played by a particular kind of argument in relation to its predicate in §7.4). We look at the nature of agreement, and go on to show that nominative and null case-marking involve agreement with T. Finally, we explore the relationship between the [epp] feature carried by T and agreement, and look at the consequences of this for control infinitives on the one hand and raising infinitives on the other.

Agreement

In traditional grammars, finite auxiliaries are said to agree with their subjects. Since (within the framework used here) finite auxiliaries occupy the head T position of TP and their subjects are in spec-TP, in earlier work agreement was said to involve a specifier–head relationship (between T and its specifier). However, there are both theoretical and empirical reasons for doubting that agreement involves a spec–head relation. From a theoretical perspective (as we saw in §4.9), Minimalist considerations lead us to the conclusion that we should restrict the range of syntactic relations used in linguistic description, perhaps limiting them to the relation c-command created by merger.

Aims

This book has two main aims, corresponding to the two conjuncts in its title. This first is to provide an introduction to recent work in syntactic theory (more particularly to how the computational component operates within the model of Universal Grammar assumed in recent work within the framework of Chomsky's Minimalist Program). The second is to provide a description of a range of phenomena in English syntax, making use of key minimalist concepts and assumptions as far as possible – while avoiding excessive technical complexity. This new book can be seen as a successor to (or updated version of) my (1997b) book Syntax: A Minimalist Introduction. There is quite a lot of duplication of material between the earlier book and this one (particularly in the first few chapters), though the present book also contains substantial new material (e.g. on agreement, case, split projections and phases), and the analysis of many phenomena presented in this book differs from that in its predecessor (with agreement being presented in terms of a feature-matching rather than a feature-checking framework, for example).

Key features

The book is intended to be suitable both for people with only minimal grammatical knowledge, and for people who have already done quite a bit of syntax but want to know something (more) about Minimalism. It is not historicist or comparative in orientation, and hence does not presuppose knowledge of earlier or alternative models of grammar. It is written in an approachable style, avoiding unnecessary complexity.

Overview

In this chapter, we look at the grammatical properties of words. We begin by looking at the categorial properties of words and at how we determine what grammatical category a given word belongs to (in a given use): in the course of our discussion we introduce some new categories which will not be familiar from traditional grammar. We go on to show that categorial information alone is not sufficient to describe the grammatical properties of words, ultimately concluding that the grammatical properties of words must be characterised in terms of sets of grammatical features.

Grammatical categories

Words are traditionally assigned to grammatical categories on the basis of their shared morphological and syntactic properties. The morphological criteria for categorising words concern their inflectional and derivational properties. Inflectional properties relate to different forms of the same word (e.g. the plural form of a noun like cat is formed by adding the plural inflection -s to give the form cats); derivational properties relate to the processes by which a word can be used to form a different kind of word by the addition of an affix of some kind (e.g. by adding the suffix -ness to the adjective sad we can form the noun sadness). Although English has a highly impoverished system of inflectional morphology, there are nonetheless two major categories of word which have distinctive inflectional properties – namely nouns and verbs.

Overview

In this chapter, we look at recent work by Chomsky suggesting that syntactic structure is built up in phases (with phases including CP and transitive vP). At the end of each phase, part of the syntactic structure already formed undergoes transfer to the phonological and semantic components, with the result that the relevant part of the structure is inaccessible to further syntactic operations from that point on.

Phases

In §8.5, we noted Chomsky's claim in recent work that all syntactic operations involve a relation between a probe P and a local goal G which is sufficiently ‘close’ to the probe (or, in the case of multiple agreement, a relation between a probe and more than one local goal). We saw that Chomsky (2001, p. 13) remarks that ‘the P, G relation must be local’ in order ‘to minimise search’, because the Language Faculty can only hold a limited amount of structure in its ‘active memory’ (Chomsky 1999, p. 9). Accordingly, syntactic structures are built up one phase at a time. Chomsky suggests (1999, p. 9) that phases are ‘propositional’ in nature, and include CP and transitive vP (more specifically, vP with an external argument, which he denotes as v*P). His rationale for taking CP and v*P as phases is that CP represents a complete clausal complex (including a specification of force), and v*P represents a complete thematic (argument structure) complex (including an external argument).

Overview

Hitherto, we have assumed a simple model of clause structure in which canonical clauses are CP+TP+VP structures. However, in §5.6 we suggested that it is necessary to ‘split’ TP into two different auxiliary-headed projections in sentences like He may be lying – namely a TP projection headed by the T constituent may and an AUXP projection headed by the AUX constituent be.In this chapter, we go on to suggest that CPs and VPs should likewise be split into more than one type of projection – hence the title of the chapter. We begin by looking at arguments that the CP layer of clause structure should be split into a number of separate projections: Force Phrase, Topic Phrase, Focus Phrase and Finiteness Phrase. We then go on to explore the possibility of splitting verb phrases into two separate projections – an inner core headed by a lexical verb and an outer shell headed by an abstract light verb.

Split CP: Force, Topic and Focus projections

Our discussion of wh-movement in chapter 6 was concerned with movement of (interrogative, exclamative and relative) wh-expressions to the periphery of clauses (i.e. to a position above TP). However, as examples like (1) below illustrate, it is not simply wh-constituents which undergo movement to the clause periphery:

1. (1) No other colleague would he turn to

In (1), no other colleague (which is the complement of the preposition to) has been focused/focalised – i.e. moved to the front of the sentence in order to focus it (and thereby give it special emphasis).