Insight: Case as a Filter on Syntactic Structures

Although θ-theory is a necessary filter on constructions created by the Merge operation, at least three problems emerge if we say that θ-theory forms the only constraint on Merge.

The first problem concerns θ-mismatches, examples in which the number of arguments does not match up with the number of θ-roles that the verb needs to assign. It turns out that an unassigned θ-role is not as bad as an argument without a θ-role. For instance, transitive verbs that are used intransitively can be quite bad (as expected by θ-theory), but sometimes they can survive. Edith assigns could be said in a situation in which the manager, on asking who assigns tasks to new employees, is told that it is Edith who does the assignments. The same holds for the verb to kill.

From Warlords to Royal Armies

In 1450 much, but not all, military power was in the hands of clan chiefs or feudal nobles: royal armies were usually agglomerations of private armies. Over time, service in royal armies had come to be governed less by feudal obligations than by commercial contracts. In Scotland military service was a general duty, organised through the host. In Tudor England the state widened military obligations to include service in the militia and sought to gain a monopoly of armed force, but in a crisis the monarch still relied on the nobility to serve with their own military followings and in the civil wars many lords recruited regiments, often from among their servants and tenants. The first professional standing army in Britain or Ireland was the New Model; after the Restoration its ethos was preserved in the new royal standing armies, supported by militias, which might perform useful auxiliary functions, but were no match for properly trained regulars. The Scottish army under Charles II was small and had to be reinforced by the militia and (controversially) the ‘Highland Host’.

The English standing army was adequate for peacetime, but too small for war, for which additional forces were raised. These became larger and larger during the wars against France from 1689. Parliament viewed these additional forces with deep suspicion, identifying standing armies with Cromwell and the ‘tyranny’ of Louis XIV; at the coming of peace in 1697 and 1713 the English army was drastically reduced. As there was also a standing army in Ireland, to maintain the ascendancy of the Protestant minority, monarchs from Charles II onwards stationed additional regiments in Ireland, to provide a reservoir of military power for England. The Union with Scotland led to the creation of a British army, with English, Scottish and (Protestant) Irish units rotated between the three kingdoms and imperial garrisons like Gibraltar and Jamaica. From George I's reign the Jacobite threat and the growth of empire meant that the peacetime army became larger and its training and regulations were standardised.

The growth of the British army reduced autonomous noble power in two ways. First, within the army a noble now derived his power to command men from a commission from the king, his commander in chief. He might also buy a commission to provide a younger son with an honourable career.

Introduction

The relationship between Crown and Parliament was more irregular and complex in Scotland and Ireland than in England. The Irish Parliament did not meet for substantial periods and the Scottish Parliament ceased to exist as a separate institution in 1707. The composition of the Irish Parliament remained more or less the same, except for the Catholic Parliament of 1689, but the Scottish Parliament's composition varied, as did its powers and relationship with the Crown. The Covenanter Revolution of 1638–41 was reversed at the Restoration, substantially re-enacted in 1689 and finally laid to rest by the Act of Union of 1707. The Irish Parliament strengthened its position in the 1690s and met regularly (usually every two years) throughout the eighteenth century.

Parliaments and People

Elections

Despite its anomalies the English electoral system under Anne delivered results which broadly reflected shifts in public opinion (see Chapter 13). Alongside the pocket boroughs were many constituencies where the electorate was too large to be bribed or browbeaten. Despite the Whigs’ efforts after 1714 to reduce and control the electorate some large boroughs continued to assert their independence, sometimes violently. Whig election managers could never take the outcome for granted.

The early modern period in Britain and Ireland does not have an immediately recognisable identity. There were substantial differences of language, society and culture between England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Whereas the medieval period can be described as ‘feudal’ and the nineteenth century as ‘industrial’, there is no obvious label for the period in between. One can think of a ‘typical’ late medieval English nobleman – say, Warwick the Kingmaker – and a ‘typical’ early eighteenth-century Whig grandee – the Duke of Newcastle – but not a ‘typical’ seventeenth-century peer. Late medieval noblemen mostly lived in fortified castles – the last, Kenilworth, was built early in Elizabeth's reign; eighteenth-century plutocrats built great unfortified country houses, like William Conolly's Palladian palace at Castletown. The early modern period was clearly an age of transition; the aim of this book is to analyse the nature and causes of that transition, an aspiration which may tempt the historian to treat the period as one of ‘modernisation’. Modernisation implies ‘progress’; both terms imply a movement from the primitive to the modern and, as such, a ‘good thing’.

The search for the modern and modernity is in many ways a variation on the old theme of the Whig interpretation of history. As the victors in the partisan struggles of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Whig historians depicted the triumph of Whig values as both desirable and inevitable. The nineteenth-century British constitution was (they said) based on religious liberty, parliamentary monarchy and the rule of law, which allowed for change without the bloodshed and upheaval experienced by less fortunate nations (like the French). God had guided the English to throw off the yoke of the Catholic Church and read and interpret the Bible for themselves. The Tudors tamed the nobility, opening the way for the rise of the gentry and ultimately the middle class. Within Parliament the House of Commons became increasingly assertive, demanding freedom of speech and using its power to grant taxation to extort concessions from the Crown. Charles I's refusal to recognise this shift of power led inevitably to the civil wars, after which the monarchy was only a shadow of its former self, like the French monarchy, restored in 1815 ‘in the baggage train of the Allies’. The way was open to the glories of the Victorian constitution.

‘The consequence of the recent war’, the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Julius Andrassy told Emperor Franz Joseph in February 1872, ‘is that power trumps justice.’ Historians have identified the militarisation of great power politics as one of the major consequences of the wars between 1854 and 1871. The unification of Germany consecrated Bismarck's open embrace of power politics as the form of diplomacy to which other states should aspire. Doering-Manteuffel labelled the period between 1871 and 1945 as the era of the Machtstaat. According to Conze, the validation of the idea of the Machtstaat in the Franco-Prussian War undermined restraints within the international system and contributed to the militarisation of international political conduct. On this reading the wars of the mid-nineteenth century marked a decisive rupture with the more restrained norms that had emerged in the Congress of Vienna in 1814/15. The alternatives to power politics, such as the free trade system espoused by Britain in the 1860s, were marginalised in the new Bismarckian dispensation.

At the risk of being too reductionist, the implication of these arguments is that the likelihood of another general war between the great powers was high after 1871. In this narrative, centred on power politics, the military are said to have played a key role. They planned for offensive wars, they pressed for increases in naval and military spending, they sparked and fuelled arms races, they influenced important decisions in domestic and foreign policy, they saw war as a creative, positive force in the history of mankind, and, in general, they pushed Europe towards a general war. However, as we shall see, there were powerful restraints on war as an instrument of politics in the early twentieth century. War plans certainly made it likely that any war between two great powers would soon escalate into a general war, but this made the prospect of war so drastic that states would only choose war in the last resort. Statesmen were well aware of the potentially catastrophic consequences of a great power conflict and sought to restrain the influence of their generals on foreign policy. The militarisation of the international system and the arms race before 1914 was the result of civilian decisions and geopolitical developments rather than the impulse of the military elites.

War Planning before 1914

Planning for war was the task of the general staffs of the European powers.

Insight: Syntax is not about Word Order

Syntax is not about word order? Yes, this is what we mean. This statement may come as a bit of a surprise because many dictionaries will define syntax in exactly that way: syntax is the study of word order. Are these dictionaries all wrong, then?

Introduction

In the first decade of the sixteenth century Western Europe still seemed overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. The Church had its critics and had faced numerous heresies, most of which had been suppressed or driven underground. Twenty years later there was a bewildering religious diversity, with challenges to the Church's teachings and practice and demands for reform. The unity of Western Christendom was shattered and various Protestant churches were established. The impetus for this process came partly from below, from townsmen and peasants, and partly from above, from princes. Where Protestantism became established historians depicted it as popular, an expression of the spirit of the people. English Protestant historiography saw Protestantism as a liberating force: laypeople used the Bible to free themselves from the tutelage of priests and popes. Catholicism bred servitude and ignorance, Protestantism thrived on the freedom to which freeborn Englishmen were accustomed, thanks to parliaments and trial by jury. In this historiography the English Protestant Reformation was inevitable: by overthrowing the power of the Pope, Henry VIII unleashed popular anti-Catholicism, anti-papalism and anticlericalism. Protestant historians focused on Protestant writers and martyrs, without asking how typical they were of contemporary opinion. The picture offered in this chapter, however, is of a nation still conservative in religion in which Protestants were a minority. The Reformation was shaped mainly by Henry VIII, who forced through the breach with Rome (essential to secure his divorce from Catherine of Aragon) and a limited hybrid reformation in the localities. Some traditional practices were forbidden, especially pilgrimages and the cult of the saints, and the monasteries were dissolved, but the Mass and the Church's teachings on salvation remained largely unchanged.

Introduction

In the Reformation Catholics argued that, having rejected the Church's authority and traditions, Protestants developed competing interpretations of the will of God. Human reason, or the Holy Spirit, led some to explain divine wisdom in new and (some said) blasphemous ways. Mainstream Reformers and Protestant princes argued that university-educated theologians should define ‘true doctrine’ and established churches, and the secular magistrate, should impose this orthodoxy on the people. Bible-reading laypeople, however, did not always meekly submit to the clergy's guidance. Many denounced continuing ‘Catholic’ practices or argued about the Eucharist. On the vexed question of salvation Catholic teaching stressed good works and the sacraments and was broadly inclusive. Protestant teachings, especially predestination, claimed that God alone determined who would be saved and that these would be a select few.

The issues raised by the Reformation created differences between Catholic and Protestant and within Protestantism. First, who could claim to interpret Scripture and on what grounds: theological training, reason, the Holy Spirit? Second, what was the purpose of worship: expounding the Word, edification, or an affirmation of community? Third, what was a ‘church’: all the people living in a parish or nation, or a self-selected body of ‘visible saints’? Fourth, how far had national churches the right to compel individual consciences? Between 1640 and 1750 these and other questions irrevocably divided the Protestants of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

Introduction

One of the most extraordinary developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the emergence of England (from 1707 Britain) as a major European and world power. Under the Tudors, despite Henry VIII's posturing, England was much weaker than Spain, France or the Holy Roman Empire. At the root of this weakness lay a lack of money. The Tudors and early Stuarts failed to tax the nation's wealth effectively in the face of opposition from Parliament and people. During the first civil war Parliament for the first time faced up to the problem of raising as much money as possible as quickly as possible. It granted the assessment and the excise which together formed the basis of government revenue in the eighteenth century. They produced a substantial and predictable income, a secure base for government borrowing. Governments which could mobilise large sums through borrowing could fight wars on a larger scale than governments dependent on taxation alone. The wars against France between 1689 and 1713 led to a second series of increases in taxation and borrowing. Parliament agreed to these taxes, despite its deep suspicion of standing armies, because the Commons retained tight control over the funding of the army and the means of maintaining military discipline. The first two Hanoverian kings had at their disposal a much larger army, navy and fiscal apparatus than the Tudors or early Stuarts, but it was only the fiscal and military aspects of government which were centralised. Local government remained decentralised and local agencies in towns and counties extended their powers.

The impetus for these developments came primarily from England. The Scots were the first to raise money without the King during the Bishops War, and the Scots Parliament agreed to raise a substantial militia under Charles II, but between 1689 and 1707 the Scots Parliament was reluctant to raise money for England's French wars. After 1707 Scotland was taxed (many would claim over-taxed) by the British Parliament.

This book is based on the syntactic approach known as minimalism and follows the generative paradigm as devised by Noam Chomsky. The literature on minimalist syntax is enormous and it is impossible to present a complete overview of all the relevant literature. In the main text we have spelled out what the major sources are for each chapter, as well as options for further reading. Please realise, though, that often we have simplified particular analyses for didactic or presentational purposes or represented them from another angle. Also realise that many of the references may not be easy to read (Chomsky's writings in particular can sometimes be very hard). For more accessible texts, we refer you to certain syntactic handbooks (e.g. Den Dikken 2013, Everaert et al. 2013 and Alexiadou & Kiss 2015) or the introductory works of our fellow syntax textbook writers, most notably Adger (2003), Haegeman (2006), Radford (2009), Tallerman (2011) and Carnie (2013).

Introduction

Events in Scotland and Ireland continued to exercise a major influence on England in the 1640s, helped by England's deep, complex internal divisions. Both Parliament and King hoped to bring the Scots army into the English civil war. The Scots initially plumped for Parliament, only to be disillusioned again by its failure to deliver on its promises. In 1647 a section of the Scots nobility signed an agreement with Charles, which fatally divided the Covenanters.

The military commander of Bosnia, General Oskar Potiorek, had pressed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand to make a trip to the recently annexed province. A visit would help the integration of Bosnia into the Habsburg empire. The Archduke, however, was a reluctant visitor, and even tried to cancel the trip in mid-April on account of the Emperor's fading health. ‘The thing is not particularly secret’, Franz Ferdinand allegedly told the Countess von Harrach, ‘because it would not surprise me, if a couple of Serbian bullets awaited me.’ Just after one o'clock on 28 June 1914, the Archduke and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated. Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian of Serbian descent, carried out the attack. Princip was a member of the Young Bosnia movement, an exponent of a Greater Yugoslav state, rather than a greater Serbian nationalist, but he had links with an extreme Serbian nationalist group, Unity or Death, which in turn had links to the Black Hand organisation and certain elements in the Serbian army. The most notable supporter was Colonel Dimitrijevic, nicknamed the ‘Bull’ (Apis), who supplied the group with guns and allowed them to move weapons across the Serbo-Austrian border in June 1914. The prime minister, Pasič, tried to prevent the transfer of military supplies, as he rightly feared it could end up provoking an Austro-Hungarian attack, but he was unable to impose the authority of his government on Dimitrijevic and other officers. By 28 June, Princip was in Sarajevo to assassinate the Archduke.

News travelled fast in the era of the telegraph and the radio. The assassination was framed in different ways across Europe, starting a process whereby initially Serbia and Austria-Hungary, but later all belligerents sought to establish the legitimacy of their actions. Josef Redlich, the Austrian scholar and liberal, immediately called the assassination a ‘world historical event’, which demonstrated that peaceful coexistence between the Habsburg empire and aggressive Serbian nationalism was impossible. When the French president, Poincaré, heard of the assassination, he simply stayed at the Longchamps racecourse outside Paris. From this perspective, the assassination was a tragedy, but hardly an event that justified war. Assassinations of leading politicians were quite common in Europe before 1914.

Insight: Constituents Are Headed

As established before, nouns can be preceded by one or more adjectives. We can, for instance, say sausages and delicious sausages. In the latter case we have combined one unit, delicious, with another unit, sausages, thereby creating a third, bigger, unit: delicious sausages. The word linguists use for such units is constituent, so we will use this term from now on.

What can we say about the behaviour of the constituent containing a noun and an adjective? Would it behave like a noun, like an adjective, or like something different? In order to investigate this, let's take the constituent delicious sausages and see what grammatical properties it has. In other words, let's see in what kind of syntactic environments this constituent of two words can stand.

First, delicious sausages can be combined with another adjective, like expensive, giving us expensive delicious sausages. Second, we can put the article the in front of it: the delicious sausages. Third, we can change delicious sausages (which is plural) into a singular expression: delicious sausage. Fourth, we can have it followed by some prepositional expression, such as from Italy, as in delicious sausages from Italy.

Introduction

For a long time historians assumed that history was the story of great men (and occasionally women) and that ordinary people played no part in government and had no say in the way they were governed. Increasingly research into town and village communities has revealed the extent of participation in government, not just by the ‘better sort’ but also by relatively humble people. Meanwhile left-wing historians argued that the popular radicalism which became apparent in the later eighteenth century could be traced back into earlier centuries. They detected a largely underground tradition running from the Peasants’ Revolt (‘When Adam delved and Eve span/Who was then the gentleman?’) through the Levellers and their Agreements of the People to Tom Paine. Here was a view of ‘popular politics’ as radical politics, created by people who thought for themselves, unlike the unthinking masses programmed by the Church to accept their subordination as part of the natural order. However, as historians looked more closely at the civil wars or the street politics of Georgian England it became clear that popular politics embraced a wide spectrum of opinion, conservative as well as radical, Royalist as well as Parliamentarian, Tory as well as Whig. Those who held such opinions might be influenced by the propaganda of the government or the clergy, but that does not mean that they could not make up their own minds. While many peasants followed their landlords to war in the 1640s, many others refused to do so; and landlords, in large numbers, fought on both sides. There had been divisions of opinion before the 1640s, but they were rarely as deep and persistent as those left by the civil wars. Issues such as the nature of the monarchy, or the relationship between Church and Dissent, persisted long after 1660.