Thomas McFadden (Leibniz-ZAS, Berlin) & Sandhya Sundaresan (Göttingen)
Locality and the argument/adjunct distinction: Structure building vs. structure-enrichment
Thomas McFadden (ZAS, Berlin) & Sandhya Sundaresan (Göttingen), based on joint work with Hedde Zeijlstra)
Adjuncts have long been considered syntactic islands (Ross 1967). Prior approaches to adjunct/argument asymmetries have involved
according adjuncts some special primitive status: e.g. involving sideward movement (Drummond & Hornstein, 2014), Late Merge (Lebeaux, 1991; Fox, 2002; Abe, 2018) or phasehood (Chomsky, 2008; Mueller, 2010).
In this talk, we start with the core empirical insight that selective opacity effects involving adjuncts and complements involve a systematic directionality restriction: complements are transparent to syntactic dependencies both into and out of them; in contrast, adjuncts are (selectively) opaque only to dependencies into them (e.g. movement or (phi-)agreement) but transparently allow syntactic dependencies out of them (e.g. adjunct control). To accommodate such facts, we will extend a particular approach to structure building (Merge), selection, and labeling which unifies insights from Minimalism and Categorial Grammar. On the strength of this, we redefine Agree, the core Minimalist operation driving syntactic dependencies, in terms of sisterhood + path-based locality (a notion that hasn't found much currency in current Minimalism but has parallels in other frameworks like HPSG/LFG, CCG and TAG). This is the idea that two elements X and Y are syntactically visible to each other iff they are connected by an uninterrupted sequence of steps, each of which satisfies the same (syntactic) condition. We will show that this theoretical machinery can accurately account for selective opacity patterns with adjuncts, including certain island effects and also discuss how it could accommodate so-called Truswell effects, namely licit cases of extraction out of adjuncts. We will conclude by speculating on the role and necessity of phases, and domain-based locality more generally, given the generative power of path-based locality.