Article contents
(Dis)harmony, the Head-Proximate Filter, and linkers1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 June 2012
Abstract
This paper presents a notion of harmonic word order that leads to a new generalisation over the presence or absence of disharmony cross-linguistically: for linkers – syntactically independent, semantically vacuous heads marking a relationship – disharmony is ungrammatical, while for any other head disharmony is simply dispreferred. Harmony is defined here by the interaction of three independently motivated word order constraints operating over the base-generated structure: linear proximity between a superordinate lexical head and the head of its dependent, uniformity in direction of headedness, and the preference for clausal dependents to follow their head. It is proposed that disharmony occurs where either a lexical head or a head bearing syntactic features encoding semantics has an ordering rule of its own. These proposals are shown to be empirically superior to the Final-Over-Final Constraint (Holmberg 2000, Biberauer, Holmberg & Roberts 2007 and subsequent work), in terms of both what is permitted and what is disallowed.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012
Footnotes
My thanks to Ad Neeleman for detailed discussions and feedback. This paper has also benefited from comments from three anonymous JL referees and the editor, Caroline Heycock. My thanks are further due to participants at presentations given at UCL, Newcastle University and the LAGB Annual Meeting 2010. Many thanks to Dennis Philip, Daniel Philipose and Leelamma Philipose for Malayalam judgments, to Misako Tanaka and Reiko Vermeulen for Japanese judgments, to Aïcha Mahamat, Hadja Habi Sali and Hamza Tidjani for Lagwan data and judgments, and to Ali Mirshahi for Persian judgments. This research is supported by the AHRC. Any errors are of course my own.
References
REFERENCES
- 11
- Cited by