Cartography and explanation

 

Luigi Rizzi
University of Geneva, University of Siena

Description
Syntactic structures are complex objects built by simple generating devices. The cartography of syntactic structures is a research program which tries to do two things: it addresses the complexity of syntactic structures by drawing structural maps as precise and detailed as possible of syntactic configurations across languages; and it tries to trace back the observed properties to simple generating devices and computational principles of the minimalist kind (Chomsky 1995), and to identify the parametrization required to capture the observed variation (see Cinque and Rizzi 2010, Rizzi and Cinque 2016 for general overviews).

 

Cartography is, among other things, a large descriptive endeavor. Twenty years of intensive cartographic work on different zones of the syntactic tree in different languages have led to the discovery of a wealth of fine properties of syntactic structures: ordering in functional sequences, mutual exclusion of distinct positions and other distributional constraints, freezing effects, etc. These discoveries enrich the empirical basis of syntactic theory, and raise issues of further explanation: how can the discovered properties be related to fundamental ingredients of linguistic computations?

 

In this minicourse, I will address some concrete cases illustrating these points. I will focus on the study of the left periphery of the clause (see Rizzi and Bocci 2017 for an overview of twenty years of research) and show the explanatory role of different principles operating in syntax and at the interfaces with sound and meaning in capturing various cartographic properties, with special reference properties of ordering and freezing.

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Selected References

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Cinque, G. & L. Rizzi (2010) “The Cartography of Syntactic Structures”. In The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, B. Heine and H. Narrog (eds). New York: Oxford University Press.

 

Chomsky, N.  (1995) The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

 

Rizzi, L. (1997) “The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery”. In Elements of Grammar, L. Haegeman (ed), Kluwer, Dordrecht.

 

Rizzi, L. (2013) “Notes on Cartography and Further Explanation.” Probus, 25.1: 197–226.

 

Rizzi, L. & Bocci, G. (2017) “The left periphery of the clause – Primarily illustrated for Italian”, to appear in the Blackwell Companion to Syntax, II edition

 

Rizzi, L. & G. Cinque (2016) “Functional categories and syntactic theory”. In Annual Review of Linguistics, 2, 2016, pp. 139-163.

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