The Morphosyntax of Constituent Ordering Patterns

Abstract

The relationship between word order and syntactic structure is one of the most intensively discussed topics in syntactic research. On the one hand, syntax in a sense is supposed to cover phenomena concerning word order as one of its most essential and important issues (cf. phrase structure rules; Chomsky 1965, head parameter; Chomsky 1981). In the current generative theorizing, on the other hand, there is an increasing tendency toward excluding word order out of the syntactic component proper. For example, Kayne (1994) claims that the realization of a surface word order is a straightfoward reflex of the syntactic structure, whereby the asymmetric c-command configuration is directly mapped onto the linear precedence relationship between constituents, i.e. word order. Within the newer generative model, researchers are developing the idea that the linear order is determined in the PF-component (cf. e.g. Richards 2004). According to this view, the syntactic component is concerned only with the hierarchical structure, but not with the relative ordering of constituents; there is no difference in formulating a syntactic structure as [X YP] or [YP X], both of which represent one and the same thing as a syntactic construct. There appear to be, however, some phenomena that show a cross-linguistic systematic difference between the two kinds of surface ordering, i.e. X-YP vs. YP-X, in the way the constituents are combined with each other: