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Lookup NU author(s): Emeritus Professor Anders Holmberg
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We review and discuss some issues to do with the relation between morphology and syntax which have played a prominent part in generative linguistic research in the past three decades. Focusing on verbal inflection, we first discuss the relation between inflection and verb placement, with special attention given to verb-initial languages. We then discuss the relation between pro-drop and agreement, where we articulate a partly new understanding of Huang’s (1989) generalization that pro-drop is characteristic of languages with rich agreement and languages with no agreement, but not languages that are in-between. We then present and discuss the Mirror Principle, one of the most significant findings in recent linguistic research. We pay special attention to the Mirror Principle as it applies in head-final languages, in the context of a model adopting Kayne’s (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom. The idea is to show how fairly complex aspects of clausal syntax, including word order and the possibility of phonetically silent arguments of a predicate, may be correlated with readily observable and, in themselves, rather simple properties of verbal inflection, and to show how, given a restrictive theory of Universal Grammar, this follows from the fact that inflections are syntactic categories, albeit realized as parts of words.
Author(s): Holmberg A, Roberts I
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Lingua
Year: 2013
Volume: 130
Pages: 111-131
Print publication date: 04/12/2012
ISSN (print): 0024-3841
ISSN (electronic): 1872-6135
Publisher: Elsevier BV
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2012.10.006
DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2012.10.006
Notes: Special issue of Lingua: Syntax and cognition: core ideas and results in syntax, edited by Luigi Rizzi.
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