Empty Category Principle Research Articles

Nguni Bare Nouns: Licensing without Case

Nguni bare or augmentless ([–A]) nominals are licit only as strict negative dependents and wh-words. They may not appear in a preverbal subject position unless local to a negation-licensed [–A] complementizer of a subjunctive clause (Pietraszko 2021). This pattern motivates an analysis in terms of negative concord and a labeling theory approach to the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) (Chomsky 2013): [–A] nouns have uninterpretable negation features that thwart agreement and labeling in [XP, YP] configurations (see also Bošković 2019, 2020 on uninterpretable features and labeling problems) unless valued by interpretable negation in a syntactic Agree relation (Zeijlstra 2008, Haegeman and Lohndal 2010, Penka 2011). A cluster of further distributional restrictions on [–A] nominals are predictable from an independently motivated Nguni clausal topography of focus (Carstens and Mletshe 2016), eliminating any role for abstract Case in explaining the facts, contra Halpert 2015 and Pietraszko 2021. The analysis is inspired by and extends to parallel restrictions in Romance languages previously attributed to the Empty Category Principle and the EPP (Contreras 1986, Longobardi 1994, Déprez 2000, Landau 2007).

Accessibility of Subjacency Principle and Empty Category Principle to SLA

A foreign language is essential for promoting world exchanges. Chomsky's theory of universal grammar is one of the representative theories to reveal how language learners acquire their mother tongue. However, in recent years, more and more researchers have focused on the accessibility of UG to SLA. This study investigates the accessibility of UG to 50 native Chinese university students by investigating their acquisition of the two general grammar principles of WH word shift limit: Adjacency Principle and Empty Category Principle. Another 5 native English speakers are set up in the control group. Questionnaires and quantitative analysis are used in this study. The author tested the students’ general performance both in the grammatical judgment and in the reading comprehension and their attitudes towards the questions, which violate either the Subjacency Principle or the Empty Category Principle. The author finds that by comparing the accuracy of the two groups, these native students are similarly sensitive to the two universal principles with English people; that is to say, the Universal Grammar is accessible to these Chinese university students’ English acquisition.

Does ellipsis repair Head Movement constraint violations?

Using English data, I show that Head Movement Constraint violations cannot be repaired by deletion and compare this result with cases of salvation and non-salvation by ellipsis from previous literature. I then consider two possible sources for this lack of repair. The first is to take the Head Movement Constraint as a derivational constraint, and the second is to assimilate it into the Empty Category Principle (Chomsky 1986).

Strict CV without government

In this paper, I aim to unify the Empty Category Principle of Government Phonology with another (more general) principle: the Obligatory Contour Principle. I show that these principles share numerous structural properties: (i) they prevent sequences of identical entities, and (ii) they trigger the same repair mechanisms. The main difference is substantial: ECP handles empty syllabic components, when OCP handles phonological features. I propose to broaden the definition of OCP in including all phonological entities and I show to what extent this definition can account for the effects of ECP. Finally, I point out that this analysis can also account for some specificities of word-edges.

(Tomme) NPer i moderne generativ syntaktisk teori (2. del)

The present paper takes its point of departure in the concept of empty NP-categories, as this is embodied in a more comprehensive theory of NPs. The theoretical framework adopted is mainly that expouned in Chomsky: Lextures on Government and Binding (1981) and subsequent works (though no attempt has been made to incorporate the revised model presented in Chomsky: Barriers (1986)). The paper gives a brief introduction to the main modules of a modern generative grammar (X-bar syntax;0-theory; government (including proper government and the Extended Empty Category Principle); the theory of abstract Case; the theory of Binding; and the theory of Bouding). The paper falls into two parts. In the first part the basic modules and principles are introduced. In the second part, to be published in the next issue of Hermes, it will be shown how these modules interact in the derivation of sentences. Particular attention will be paid to NP-Movement and Wh-Movement. A separate section will deal with the status of PRO. The full bibliography appears after both parts.

(Tomme) NPer i moderne generativ syntaktisk teori (1. del)

The present paper takes its point of departure in the concept of empty NP-categories, as this is embodied in a more comprehensive theory of NPs. The theoretical framework adopted is mainly that expouned in Chomsky: Lextures on Government and Binding (1981) and subsequent works (though no attempt has been made to incorporate the revised model presented in Chomsky: Barriers (1986)). The paper gives a brief introduction to the main modules of a modern generative grammar (X-bar syntax;0-theory; government (including proper government and the Extended Empty Category Principle); the theory of abstract Case; the theory of Binding; and the theory of Bouding). The paper falls into two parts. In the first part the basic modules and principles are introduced. In the second part, to be published in the next issue of Hermes, it will be shown how these modules interact in the derivation of sentences. Particular attention will be paid to NP-Movement and Wh-Movement. A separate section will deal with the status of PRO. The full bibliography appears after both parts.

That-clause Subject/Object Asymmetry in Second Language Acquisition of ECP Principle by Iranian Learners

This study is concerned with the question of whether Persian-speaking EFL learners recognize Empty Category Principle and ‘that-trace’ effect constraint. One-hundred fifty EFL learners participated in the study from among whom 90 language learners at Najafabad Azad University, selected by the OPT, participated in a decontextualized Grammaticality Judgment task. They were three groups of high, mid, and low. Another 60 English learners studying at Gooyesh Language Institute, selected based on their final scores, participated in a contextualized GJ task. They were two groups of 30 (high and mid). Two one-way ANOVAs were conducted for the decontextualized GJ task’s results; one for each subject/objrct extraction tasks; two independent t-tests were conducted for the contextualized GJ task: one for each subject/object extraction tasks. It was concluded that participants of the study did not make a distinction between subject/object extractions and they did not recognize ECP and locality conditions in ‘that’ clauses.

The Availability of Universal Grammar to Second Language Learners: A Case of Wh-movement

In this experimental study, the researcher examined the accessibility of Universal Grammar to adult Persian learners of English with respect to the Empty Category Principle and the Subjacency. These principles are not operative in Persian as it is a Wh-in situ language. A 5-point Likert scale acceptability judgment task, which included both grammatical and ungrammatical extractions, was given to a group of 35 advanced Iranian EFL learners. The control group consisted of 30 adult native speakers of English. Their responses provided the baseline against which we measured the performance of non-native speakers. The categorical performance of natives and non-natives on both types of grammatical and ungrammatical extractions was revealed through within-group comparisons. Similarly, between-group comparisons displayed that the performance of Iranian EFL learners did not differ significantly from that of the natives in the ungrammatical constructions. In general, the findings of this study led the researcher to conclude that Universal Grammar constrains adult EFL learners’ competence.

THE ACQUISITION OF ENGLISH RESTRICTIVE RELATIVE CLAUSES BY HUNGARIAN LEARNERS OF ENGLISH, Judit Kiss-Gulyás

THE ACQUISITION OF ENGLISH RESTRICTIVE RELATIVE CLAUSES BY HUNGARIAN LEARNERS OF ENGLISH.Judit Kiss-Gulyás. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2004. Pp. 169. $26.00 paper.This volume presents a study on the acquisition of English restrictive relative clauses (RRCs) by Hungarian speakers through an investigation of two universal principles—subjacency and the empty category principle (ECP)—and consideration of how the different instantiation of these two principles and the different parametric settings of the languages play a role in the interlanguage development of first language (L1) Hungarian learners of English as a second language (L2). Assuming the generative theory of Universal Grammar (UG), the objective of the study is to investigate whether Hungarian learners of English provide particular evidence for the partial availability of UG in their interlanguage grammar—also known as the partial access view of UG—or provide evidence for other views, such as the no access or the full access view, considering both the weak and strong versions.

EPP Extensions

The fact that the specifier of T0 is subject both to the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) and to the Empty Category Principle (ECP) has remained an unexplained accident within Government-Binding Theory. I propose a principled account of this correlation. The EPP is a selectional requirement of functional heads (e.g., T, Top, C) that applies at PF—an instance of p-selection for an overt element. Like all selectional requirements, it applies to the head of the selected phrase, explaining why null heads cannot appear in EPP positions (thus deriving certain representational ECP effects). A wide range of empirical results follow, all unified by the exclusion of null-headed phrases from EPP positions: subject-object asymmetries in the distribution of bare nouns in Romance and sentential complements; failure of certain adjuncts to occur in clause-initial position; resistance of indirect objects to Ā-movement; and phonological doubling of heads of fronted categories. I argue against the agreement/checking view of the EPP and show that only the selectional construal allows a natural explanation of its puzzling properties.

IS IT DIFFICULT TO ACQUIRE SUBJACENCY AND THE ECP

This paper aims to examine English- and Japanese-speaking adult learners' acquisition of Subjacency^1 and the Empty Category Principle^2 (ECP) (Chomsky 1981, 1986) in Chinese. The participants were forty intermediate foreign students of the Mandarin Training Center of National Taiwan Normal University: half were native English speakers and half Japanese. In addition, there were twenty native controls. Two tasks (i.e., a preference task and an ordering task) were designed on the basis of the following properties concerning Subjacency and the ECP: wh-island constraints, complex NP constraints, sentential subject constraints, that-trace effects and subject/object asymmetries, and superiority effects. The results show that, except for the superiority effect, neither group of L2 learners carried their L1 knowledge to acquire Subjacency and the ECP, suggesting that L1 influence is not significant. Furthermore, it was found that the Japanese speakers did not perform significantly better than the English speakers. This shows that Universal Grammar is still available, since our participants have reset their L1 parameters to proper L2 values. In addition, among these features our participants did less well on non-superiority, and the native controls rejected island violations more strongly than either group of L2 participants. Finally, Subjacency and the ECP were found equally easy for our participants to acquire.

Case Theory, Dp Movement, and Interpretation: A New Approach to the Distribution of French Subnominal Clitic en

This article proposes a new solution to an old problem in the syntax of French, namely the contrast in grammaticality observed with the two clitics en (genitive and quantitative) when used with raised subjects. I propose that the contrast observed in these contexts should be explained by Case theory, and show that a Case-theoretic approach is superior to an ECP/Binding approach in accounting for the distribution of en in a variety of contexts, including similar contexts in Italian and Catalan. I argue that Case is a feature of the nominal head (N) of a DP, that Case may be checked in configurations other than [Spec, head], and that there is no need for features such as Nominative or Accusative, [+/− Case] being sufficient. The proposal has consequences for Case theory and for checking theory in general. More generally the article is a contribution to the understanding of phenomena that used to be understood in terms of the Empty Category Principle (ECP). It exemplifies how properties of the internal structure of moved elements can explain their distribution.

Case and the ECP revisited: reply to Kellerman and Yoshioka (1999)

Kellerman and Yoshioka (1999) report the results of three studies on case drop in Japanese involving Dutch-speaking L2 learners. They claim that contra Kanno (1996 and 1998), there was no evidence that their subjects have access to the Empty Category Principle (ECP), which is claimed to regulate the omission of case particles in Japanese. In its place, they propose an alternative functional account: the one-noun hypothesis. Kellerman and Yoshioka point to the availability of Japanese in Hawaii (where Kanno's studies took place) as the source for the ‘inter-population intra-principle’ inconsistency between their study and hers. This paper re-examines their results and argues that they do not undermine the ECP hypothesis. In support of Kanno (1996 and 1998), this paper also presents the results of a new experiment and a reanalysis of Hirakawa's (1998) study.

Attributive Comparative Deletion

Comparatives are among the most extensively investigatedconstructions in generative grammar, yet comparativesinvolving attributive adjectives have received a relativelysmall amount of attention. This paper investigates a complexarray of facts in this domain that shows that attributivecomparatives, unlike other comparatives, are well-formed onlyif some type of ellipsis operation applies within thecomparative clause. Incorporating data from English, Polish,Czech, Greek, and Bulgarian, we argue that these facts supporttwo important conclusions. First, violations of Ross's LeftBranch Condition that involve attributive modifiers should notbe accounted for in terms of constraints on LF representations(such as the Empty Category Principle), but rather in terms ofthe principle of Full Interpretation at the PF interface. Second,ellipsis must be analyzed as deletion of syntactic material fromthe phonological representation. In addition, we present newevidence from pseudogapping constructions that favors anarticulated syntax of attributive modification in which certaintypes of attributive modifiers may occur outside DP.

Interand intra-population consistency: a comment on Kanno (1998)

An article in the last Second Language Research (Kanno, 1998) describes studies in which American adult learners of Japanese in Hawai’i are tested for their knowledge of two UG principles: the Empty Category Principle and the Overt Pronoun Constraint.Kanno shows that native-like knowledge on the part of a learner of the workings of the one principle will not necessarily guarantee that the same individual will have knowledge of the other principle at the same point in time. Therefore, learners are not ‘laterally consistent’. Furthermore, where learners do demonstrate knowledge of a principle at Time 1, they may not do so at Time 2. Thus, says Kanno, there is also a problem of ‘longitudinal consistency’.However, in our comment on Kanno’s paper, we suggest that another form of ‘lateral inconsistency’, which arises from a failure to replicate Kanno’s findings for the ECP in another population of adult learners, constitutes a further muddying of the waters in the UG accessibility debate.

Minimalism, scope and VP structure by Thomas Stroik (review)

668 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 3 (1998) direct object, both ofwhich N eventually rejects The analysis culminates in Ch. 7, 'Ergativity in Inuktitut' (191-236), in which she concludes that, from the point of view ofargument structure and grammatical relations, Inuktitut must be seen as sui generis, falling outside of all previous treatments ofergativity, since a transitive sentence has two subjects and no object. N's analysis often appears to rely on its own set of unquestioned assumptions such as that a stable relationship should be found between case marking and thematic role or between case marking and subjecthood ; her declaration that only ergative subjects are agents needs more argumentation than she gives it. Why should the ergative noun be agentive in arnaup quimmiq takuvanga 'the woman sees the dog', but the absolutive noun be nonagentive in arnaq qimmimik takujuq 'the woman sees the/a dog'? Similarly , her claim that neither the ergative nor the absolutive 'subject' qualifies as the sole 'subject' (214-30) seems to focus on these case categories without looking at the relationships between them as carefully as might be hoped: N states that incorporation always acts on the absolutive without mentioning the well-known stranding of instrumental casemarked modifiers, and claims that anaphoric coreference gives evidence for the subjecthood only of the ergative NP, which is highly questionable. Likewise, she chooses instrumental case-marked NP in antipassive sentences as the only true direct object, since it 'fulfills an important criterion for direct objects, that of being the obligatory nominal supplement to the predicate' (235). However, she omits mentioning that the absolutive NP in an ergative-absolutive transitive sentence is obligatory for purposes of interpretation, although it can be phonologically null, thanks to verbal cross-referencing. In the final chapter, 'Transforming the images' (237-77), N presents her conclusions and gives a brief grammatical sketch of Inuktitut more in accordance with her theoretical notions. The ramifications ofN's radical theoretical claims are left largely open, hopefully to be pursued in future research. In general, the book is well-written and clear although there is some variation in orthography and citation forms, i.e. kuni- 'kiss' (259) vs. kunik- 'kiss' (273), which may cause some confusion to the non-Eskimologist reader. An unfortunate glitch has caused all footnotes after fn. 1 38 to be numbered incorrectly: the reader must thereafter add 87 to the footnote reference. [David Parkinson, Microsoft Corporation.] Minimalism, scope and VP structure. By Thomas Stroik. Thousand Oaks, London, & New Delhi: Sage Publications , 1996. Pp. vii, 173. $37.00. The main aim ofthis book is to argue for a particular view of the structure and ordering of constituents within the extended VP projection. Stroik is arguing here against various versions of this ordering proposed in the past and using evidence from four main areas (scope, superiority effects, bare NP adverbials, and psych-verbs) to support his claim that the goal argument is generated structurally higher than the theme, that temporal and locative adverbs are sisters to the verb, and that whereas manner adverbs are VPadjoined , reason adverbs are AgrSP-adjoined. The book is well-organized and clear although the data are notoriously tricky, and some readers may find it difficult to agree with certain grammaticality judgments regarding sentences involving multiple WH-insitu phrases or scope effects between multiple quantified phrases. Ch. 1, 'Introduction to syntactic representation' (1-31), serves as a useful introduction to current issues in government and binding/minimalist syntactic theory and allows S to discuss some of the assumptions he will rely on throughout the book. S presents the debate between conditions on economy ofderivation vs. conditions on representation by arguing in favor of a representational approach to the empty category principle (ECP) and the distribution of PRO, as opposed to a more orthodox minimalist derivational approach. Using Aoun & Li's minimal binding requirement as a means for gauging the representational conditions which must hold at LF, S examines four main sources of evidence for the proposed VP structure. Ch. 2, 'Scope and the VP shell hypothesis' (32-72), focuses on the interactions between multiple quantified phrases and WH-words in sentences such as Why did Jill read no one anything (65), using the alternation between...

The Return of Constructions

Review essay on: Goldberg, A. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. University of Chicago Press (1995). Pp. xi+265.The cornerstone of traditional descriptive grammars is the construction: a recurrent pattern of linguistic elements that serves some well-defined communicative function. Prototypical constructions are sentence-level patterns such as, in English: the imperative, the ditransitive, the passive, the resultative, the yes–no question, and the cleft (each of which may have some subtypes). Also included in some theorists' definition of construction are components of sentences such as the prepositional phrase, the noun phrase, or the genitive noun phrase. Traditional constructions may have some specific words or morphemes associated with them (e.g. by in the full passive, 's in the genitive), but these are generally closed-class morphemes. Almost by definition, traditional constructions are relatively abstract patterns that apply across whole classes of open-class morphemes.One of the defining features of modern-day generative grammar is the absence of constructions. Chomsky (1981) hypothesized that grammatical structure comprises two primary levels: the level of principles and parameters, which is much more abstract than constructions and includes everything from the subjacency constraint to the empty category principle, and the level of the lexicon, which includes all of the concrete morphemes and words of a particular language. In this view, constructions represent a ‘middle level’ of analysis that is, in effect, an epiphenomenon resulting from the interaction of the two primary levels. One outcome of this theoretical move has been that generative linguists concerned with construction-level phenomena have had to fill the generative lexicon with ever richer types of linguistic information, especially for verbs (e.g. Bresnan, 1982; Jackendoff, 1990; Levin, 1995; Pinker, 1989).

Overt Scope Marking and Covert Verb-Second

In this article I investigate certain phenomena relating to superiority, the Empty Category Principle (ECP), and scope. I propose a chain-based scope-marking convention and a new analysis of adjunction, and hypothesize that English is a covert verb-second grammar. The analysis is couched within checking theory and ultimately within the bare theory of phrase structure. I propose category-neutral(-ized) LF representations, displaying VP-recursion but lacking functional heads and their projections, and I suggest that this, in turn, allows significant simplification of index-sensitive head government conditions appearing in many contemporary formulations of the ECP.

Logical form: From GB to minimalism By Norbert Hornstein (review)

142LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 1 (1998) language other than English than the BE students were when they entered school! H does not of course discuss the US case, but to his immense credit, he recognizes the great multilingual potential of France's own linguistic minorities—remember especially his assumption that all children would maintain their 'langue maternelle'; these minorities can assist importantly in H's ambitious multilingual educational program, in which every French schoolchild would attain some degree of communicative ability in at least three languages other than French. We can only hope that H's program will succeed and that its success will encourage efforts along these lines elsewhere in Europe and around the world. REFERENCES Freudenstein, Reinhold. 1996. Foreign language teaching after the year 2000. Georgetown University Round Table on languages and linguistics 1996, ed. by James E. Alatis, Carolyn A. Straehle, Maggie Ronkin, and Brent Gallenberger, 43-54. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Hagège. Claude. 1996. Le français, histoire d'un combat. Boulogne: Editions Michel Hagège. Hamers, Josiane, and Michel Blanc. 1983. Bilingualité et bilinguisme. Bruxelles: P. Mardaga. Weinreich, Uriel. 1953. Languages in contact. New York: Linguistic Circle of New York. Department of Anthropology and Program in Linguistics Binghamton University (SUNY) PO Box 6000 Binghamton, NY 13902-6000 [straight@binghamton edu] Logical form: From GB to minimalism. By Norbert Hornstein. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995. Pp ix, 267. Reviewed by Daniel L. Everett, University of Pittsburgh This is a well written and thought-provoking introduction to the study ofmeaning in Chomsky's minimalist program (MP). It argues that MP enjoys significant conceptual and empirical advantages over both government and binding theory (GB) and nonderivational theories which place the burden of syntactic explanation on output conditions on syntactic representations. The range of coverage, general clarity of writing, importance of the subject matter, and status of the author make this an important book which every linguist interested in meaning should own. My overall evaluation of this book is positive. However, I am going to focus this review on a few (but nontrivial) objections that arose in my reading, because I believe that these negative aspects are more useful in understanding the place of this research program in modem linguistics research. The book begins with two bemusing statements. First, Homstein claims that in MP 'those phenomena ... characteristic of meaning are explicitly represented in a phrase marker whose structure is obtained from an SS phrase marker by successive application of Move-a' (5).1 In fact, only a small percentage of meaning-related phenomena can be derived in this way, namely (and somewhat circularly), structure-based meanings. Were s/he to take H literally here, the reader might get the erroneous impression that LF has something to say about, e.g. connotation vs. denotation, metaphor, figurative meaning, antinomy, etc. Second, H claims that LF is 'formally very similar to the logicians' logical form' (10) (what I will label If). But this is true only in the broadest and nearly meaningless of ways, namely, that If and LF both have recursion and syntax: If has no quantifier raising (QR), move-a, empty category principle, or full interpretation, to 1 H should not be blamed too much for these types of statements since they arise all too naturally in Chomskyan theory, which has generally been marked by an off-putting, glaring type of false advertising, namely, that it claims to be a theory of language (or ?-language'), when in fact it is nothing of the sort. Generative linguistics has never been a theory of language and always and only a theory of some aspects of grammar (namely, those for which no semantic, sociological, or functional factor can be proved to play a causal role). REVIEWS143 name a few obvious differences between If and LF. Moreover, If, unlike LF, lacks content items (i.e. words). I doubt if professional logicians would be very sanguine about identifying If and LF, even in the most general of ways. All but three of the nine chapters in this book are built around specific empirical issues that have traditionally received considerable attention in formal theories of grammar—general properties of logical syntax, antecedent-contained deletion, weak...

Clauses without complementizers: Finite IP-complementation in English

Finite subordinate clauses in English which lack an overt complementizer (that-less clauses) have been analyzed either as CPs with a null head (the CP-hypothesis) or as finite IP complements (the IP-hypothesis). This paper provides novel evidence from adverbial adjunction facts in favor of the IP-hypothesis. An immediate consequence is the loss of the Empty Category Principle account of the distribution of that-less clauses (Stowell 1981). However, it is shown that this is not a serious objection as the ECP account is problematic in many respects. The IP analysis resonates with several strands of current research, being compatible both with the research program which seeks to eliminate c-selection in favor of s-selection (for example Pesetsky 1991) and with recent approaches which seek to eliminate superfluous levels of projection (Chomsky 1995; Grimshaw 1994)