There is a tension between Chomsky's recent Minimalist theory and the cartographic program initiated by Cinque. Cinque's cartography argues for a large number of fine-grained categories organized in one or more universal Rich Functional Hierarchies (RFH). The subtlety of the evidence and the richness of the inventory virtually force an innatist approach. In contrast, Chomsky argues for a minimal ...

Many languages have specialized locative words or morphemes translating roughly into words like ‘front,’ ‘back,’ ‘top,’ ‘bottom,’ ‘side,’ and so on. Often, these words are used instead of more specialized adpositions to express spatial meanings corresponding to ‘behind,’ ‘above,’ and so on. I argue, on the basis of a cross-linguistic survey of such expressions, that in many cases they motivate a ...

I argue in this paper for a novel analysis of case in Icelandic, with implications for case theory in general. I argue that structural case is the manifestation on the noun phrase of features which are semantically interpretable on verbal projections. Thus, Icelandic case does not encode features of noun phrase interpretation, but it is not uninterpretable either; case is properly seen as reflecting ...

All Germanic languages make extensive use of verb-particle combinations (known as separable-prefix verbs in the OV languages). I show some basic differences here distinguishing the Scandinavian type from the OV West Germanic languages, with English superficially patterning with Scandinavian but actually manifesting a distinct type. Specifically, I argue that the P projection is split into p and P ...

The core question behind this Frontiers research topic is whether explaining linguistic phenomena requires appeal to properties of human cognition that are specialized to language. We argue here that investigating this issue requires taking linguistic research results seriously, and evaluating these for domain-specificity. We present a particular empirical phenomenon, bound variable interpretations ...

The purpose of this paper is to document and describe the case system of the most conservative variety of Övdalian still spoken ('Traditional Övdalian,' TÖ). The system is compared with the four-case system of Old Swedish (OS) and the three-case system of Classical Övdalian (CÖ) described by Levander 2009. I argue that TÖ distinguishes three cases, but in full noun phrases, only manifests a two-case ...

In some limited cases, English allows a particular preposition to combine with a certain kind of subordinate clause, as exemplified by <i>in that</i> in “I take the proposal seriously, in that I loathe it”. In contrast, Norwegian systematically allows prepositions to combine with subordinate clauses (as in <i>Det resulterte i at vi vant</i>, literally “It resulted in that we won”). I argue that the ...

Most Slavic prefixes can be assigned to one of two large categories, lexical and superlexical. The lexical prefixes are like Germanic particles, in having resultative meanings, often spatial, but often idiosyncratic. The superlexical prefixes are like adverbs or auxiliary verbs, having aspectual and quantificational meanings. I present a syntactic account of the two types of prefix, arguing that the ...