A minimalist approach to scrambling: Evidence from Persian

A minimalist approach to scrambling: Evidence from Persian Jila Ghomeshi Language, Volume 84, Number 3, September 2008, pp. 646-648 (Review)

Published by Linguistic Society of America DOI: 10.1353/lan.0.0041

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REFERENCE HUDDLESTON, RODNEY, and GEOFFREY K. PULLUM. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. HUDSON, RICHARD. 1994. About 37% of word-tokens are nouns. Language 70.331–39. Department of Linguistics University of Washington Box 354340 Seattle, WA 98195-4340 [[email protected]]

A minimalist approach to scrambling: Evidence from Persian. By SIMIN KARIMI. (Studies in generative grammar 76.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005. Pp. 265. ISBN 3110182963. $123.20. Reviewed by JILA GHOMESHI, University of Manitoba Simin Karimi is the best-known generative syntactician working on Persian in North America. This book is the culmination of her long-held interest in scrambling, which has also motivated the organization of a conference, the publication of an edited volume, and several single-authored papers on the subject. K’s research interests are not limited to scrambling, however; she has also published papers on, among other things, the object marker -ra and on complex predicates—both very popular subjects within the field of Persian linguistics. As the title indicates, K uses Persian to investigate the nature of scrambling within the minimalist program. As such, the book is less about Persian than it is about generative syntactic theory, and K frequently includes other languages that exhibit scrambling in her discussions, notably German, Japanese, and Hindi. Taking scrambling to be free word order resulting from movement, she poses the following questions on the first page of her book: (i) What motivates the movement of various constituents within a clause? (ii) Is this movement optional? (iii) Does it have an effect on semantic interpretation? In seeking to answer these questions, K starts with some fairly uncontroversial assumptions about Persian syntax. She proposes that Persian, which has default SOV word order, is underlyingly SOV as well; that sentential complements to verbs (as opposed to DPs and PPs) are basegenerated after the verb, where they surface; and that T (as opposed to V and other lexical projections) is head-initial. Although none of these claims are radical departures from what can be found in the literature on Persian, they each present theoretical problems that K addresses in the first chapter. K goes on to develop her theory of Persian clause structure in Ch. 3, after presenting a survey of past approaches to scrambling in the second chapter of the book. Her proposal here is that all constituents of a sentence remain within vP in the ‘unmarked’ case. (An unmarked sentence is one that is neutral with respect to information structure.) This view is possible given two recent developments in syntactic theory. The first is the move away from doing morphology in the syntax. Whether one assumes that verbs are inserted into syntax fully inflected (as K does on p. 9) or whether one assumes distributed morphology whereby morphemes are spelled out postsyntactically (as she does on p. 26), verbs are not required to pick up their inflectional morphology via movement. The second development that plays an important role in K’s theory of Persian clause structure is the nature of the vP projection itself. It is in the specifier of vP that subjects are checked for nominative case, whether they have been merged there (agents) or have moved there (themes). It is in the lower specifier of vP that specific direct objects can be checked for accusative case. (Nonspecific direct objects do not move to the lower specifier of vP.) Agreement on the verb can be checked within vP via the operation Agree. The only remaining reason why any constituent would move out of this domain is the EPP, and here K proposes that the EPP should be understood in a new way.

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K distinguishes two kinds of EPP. The first kind is the original extended projection principle of Chomsky 1981, which states that every clause must have a subject. She calls this the EPPg (where g stands for grammatical). Noting that the EPPg usually involves movement of an XP into [Spec, TP] or V-movement to T, K proposes as a third alternative that the EPPg can be satisfied morphologically, that is, that the rich agreement on the verb can satisfy the EPP feature. Given that this same argument has been used to explain the licensing of null subjects in languages that allow them, this opens up a potentially interesting avenue for exploration, namely whether null-subject languages tend to lack the movement-inducing kind of EPPg. The second kind of EPP is named the EPPs (where s stands for syntactic) and is the collective name for a set of strong features that trigger the movement of constituents to the edge of vP and beyond. These features correspond to discourse properties like [Ⳮtopic] or [Ⳮfocus] and attract constituents to the specifiers of the projections in which they appear. The specifier of TP hosts background topics, the specifier of Focus Phrase hosts contrastively focused constituents, and the specifier of the higher Topic Phrase hosts shifted topics. Together these projections, CP, TopP, FocP, and TP as a set make up the operator/discourse phase. They sit atop vP, which is the lexical phase. With this overall view, the questions that K starts out with can now be answered: (i) movement is motivated by strong features, (ii) when these features are selected, movement is obligatory, and (iii) movement to check EPPs features has an effect on the discourse-functional properties of a sentence because the features themselves have semantic content. The core of the book works out the implications of this theory for issues such as scope, binding, WH-movement, island constraints, and the A/A′ distinction. In so doing K employs another means of feature checking, by which features themselves (e.g. focus or WH) move to adjoin to higher heads (e.g. Foc or C, respectively). What remains to be explored is how XP movement triggered by the EPPs, Agree, and feature movement are distinguished from one another such that when one applies the others do not. Another area for future exploration is whether scrambling occurs within the vP, as suggested by Kahnemuyipour (2001), for example. In keeping with the goal of generative syntactic theory, this book seeks to reduce the complexity in language to a few general principles and to account for the differences among languages with the kinds of features involved. There remains some messiness at the edges, however. For instance, the binary distinction between a lexical domain (vP and below) where constituents are basegenerated and the operator/discourse domain (TP and above) to which constituents are scrambled does not suffice for the binding and weak crossover facts. Consider the following configurations where in 1a the nonspecific direct object has moved past an indirect object, in 1b the indirect object has moved past a specific direct object, and in 1c a specific direct object has moved past an indirect object. (1) a. DOnonspecific . . . IO . . . DOnonspecific b. IO . . . DOspecific . . . IO c. DOspecific . . . IO . . . DOspecific In 1a the direct object cannot bind the indirect object and in 1b the indirect object cannot bind the direct object, but in 1c the specific direct object CAN bind the indirect object. This is surprising given that in all three cases the highest constituents have ‘crossed over’ the next highest constituent. K’s explanation for 1c is that the specific direct object receives its INTERPRETATION in the higher position. It is where a constituent is interpreted that is important for binding (177, ex. 3). This means we really have a three-way distinction: (i) where a constituent is base-generated, (ii) where it receives its interpretation, and (iii) where it occurs on the surface. The division of a sentence into three zones rather than two may ultimately help here (for such proposals see Grohmann 2003, which talks about a Theta-domain, an Agreement-domain, and a Discoursedomain, and Williams 2003 for a similar idea). Similarly, K provides some descriptive generalizations about scrambling and binding that together argue against radical reconstruction theory (Saito 1985 and work thereafter) but that remain rather mystifying in and of themselves. She suggests that scrambling never bleeds binding relations and that it can feed principles B and C but not A. Furthermore, she notes that clitic

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pronouns pattern differently from independent pronouns. For clitic pronouns, scrambling does bleed principle B. Again, it may be the case that a more articulated theory of the categorial status of anaphors, pronominals, and R-expressions may help here (see e.g. De´chaine & Wiltschko 2002, which suggests that pronouns come in three category types: pro-DPs, pro-⌽Ps, and proNPs). As one further example of a case where a simple and elegant generalization does not seem to work, there is the issue of the relation between verb agreement and the animacy of the subject in Persian. Inanimate plural subjects need not agree in number with the verb, while animate plural subjects must do so. That is, with inanimate plural subjects verb agreement may be either plural or singular. K wants to argue that, like direct objects, subjects surface in different positions depending on whether they are specific or nonspecific. Specific subjects move to the specifier of vP. Nonspecific subjects stay in PredP. She then tries to link specificity and animacy. She suggests that subjects that remain in PredP do not receive Nom Case and do not trigger agreement with the verb. While desirable, the connection between specificity and animacy does not hold. As pointed out in Sedighi 2005, nonspecific animate subjects MUST agree in number with the verb, while specific inanimate subjects need not agree in number with the verb. In other words, it is animacy and not specificity that plays a role in subject agreement, while it is specificity (or definiteness) and not animacy that plays a role in case marking of the object. While there are a number of areas where the facts remain resistant to simple generalizations, there are also cases where K introduces a generalization that is both novel and interesting. As an example, consider K’s constraint on long-distance scrambling that she develops in Ch. 6 (214, ex. 54). This constraint states that the scrambling of an XP constituent is not possible if it crosses a YP constituent with the same grammatical function (e.g. subject, object, indirect object) and furthermore that the constraint holds only if YP is ‘lexical’ or overt. K provides many examples to illustrate this constraint—examples that would appear very mysterious without it. This is what the best of generative syntax has to offer: elegant generalizations for an array of complex facts that, when combined with K’s clear and comprehensive presentation, can be very satisfying. As a note on the book itself, there is an appalling number of typos and other small mistakes that any good copyeditor should have caught. On at least one out of every two or three pages there is a spelling, grammar, or terminological error or some mistake in the cited data. While these errors do not affect the main points, they are irritating to the extreme, and they do not reflect well on the publisher.

REFERENCES CHOMSKY, NOAM. 1981. Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris. DE´CHAINE, ROSE-MARIE, and MARTINA WILTSCHKO. 2002. Decomposing pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 33.409–42. GROHMANN, KLEANTHES K. 2003. Prolific domains: On the anti-locality of movement dependencies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. KAHNEMUYIPOUR, ARSALAN. 2001. On WH-questions in Persian. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 46.1/ 2.41–61. SAITO, MAMORU. 1985. Some asymmetries in Japanese and their theoretical implications. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation. SEDIGHI, ANOUSHA. 2005. Subject-predicate agreement restrictions in Persian. Ottawa: University of Ottawa dissertation. WILLIAMS, EDWIN. 2003. Representation theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Linguistics Department University of Manitoba Winnipeg, MB R3T 5V5 Canada [[email protected]]