Abstract
This article presents a perspective on syntactic cyclicity in minimalism that is compatible with fundamental ideas in construction–grammar approaches. In particular, I outline the minimalist approach to syntactic structure building and highlight that units of potentially any phrasal size can be atomic items in the syntactic derivation, showing that the opposition between simplex linguistic items (“words”) and more complex ones (“phrases”) in minimalism is in principle as artificial as in many construction–grammar approaches. Based on this perspective on structure building, I focus on the empirical domain of subextraction patterns out of complex subjects, adjuncts, and complements, and I demonstrate that the acceptability patterns in this domain can be explained by a functional approach to syntactic cyclicity: Unacceptable patterns are ruled out not for configurational (and hence syntactic) reasons, but rather they systematically follow from infelicitous interpretations at the syntax–discourse interface. This raises the question of whether syntactic cyclicity is (at least in part) motivated by performance (read: “language-in-use”) constraints, which I consider another area for fruitful interaction between construction–grammar and usage-based accounts on the one hand and minimalism on the other hand.
Highlights
Generative syntax and construction–grammar approaches share their history (Harris, 1993), and many of their conceptual foundations
Constructions are an integral part of minimalist syntax too, as outputs of separate derivation layers – and I hasten to add that we find this core assumption in many more generative approaches, such as nanosyntax (Caha, 2009; Starke, 2010), distributed morphology (Harley and Noyer, 1999; Halle and Marantz, 2004), and related derivational approaches (Marantz, 1997)
In the context of subject, adjunct, and complement opacity, the chunking of the derivation into opaque domains is determined by properties of the syntax– discourse interface: A single derivation layer cannot contain two syntactic objects whose interpretations clash at the syntax–discourse interface
Summary
Generative syntax and construction–grammar approaches share their history (Harris, 1993), and many of their conceptual foundations (see, e.g., Goldberg, 2006, p. 4). The section on The Numeration and Derivation Layering first introduces the account of syntactic structure building summarized in Trotzke and Zwart (2014).
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