49
I currently have no evidence bearing on the question of whether the variation in functional heads which can be either [+ pied-piping] or [- pied-piping] in mid-Ulster English is a case of competition between morphosyntactic doublets, and hence unstable diachronically, or whether the different versions of each head are distinct enough in usage (based on semantic, pragmatic, or even prosodic factors) that they are not in competition. In principle, either state of affairs could hold in this case.
The adoption of Kayne’s (1994) conception of head-finality, in which all head-final structures are derived by the leftward movement of the given head’s complement, allows the GHC to be rewritten entirely in terms of hierarchical relations without direct reference to linear precedence. Once the antisymmetric approach to head- final languages has been spelled out, it is possible to see that scrambling (with “object shift” as a subcase), is only sensitive to c-command, and the difference between heads appearing to the left or right of potentially scrambled elements is entirely derivable from the c-command relations. The GHC can also be seen as a general constraint on the operation of adjunction in general, not a specific constraint on scrambling. I have renamed the constraint below, in accordance with its more general scope of application:
(17) Conservation of C-Command:
Adjunction cannot subtract a c-command relation holding between a head and a non-head.50
(E.g., Scrambling cannot change the hierarchical relationship between head and phrase, but other operations, like A and A’-movement, can do so.)
This constraint, coupled with the following hypothesis about the nature of scrambling, derives the GHC:
50
By “head”, I specifically mean a “MWd”, defined in Embick & Noyer (2001: 574) as a head not dominated by further head-projection. This excludes sub-parts of complex heads and traces of head- movement (which results in head incorporation).
1) Scrambling is syntactically optional (though it may be mandated by semantic, prosodic, or information structural concerns).
2) All optional operations (i.e. scrambling, modification) are instances of adjunction.51
3) Adjunction can be via external/initial merger (e.g. modifier-adjunction) or internal merger.
4) Scrambling is internal adjunction.
5) Therefore, scrambling obeys the Conservation of C-Command like other types of adjunction.
I mentioned about that scrambling is an unusual case of internal adjunction, where an element is adjoined after being initially merged in another position (e.g. in object position).52
Aside from scrambling, adjoined phrases (e.g. PP modifiers or AdvPs)
51
Note that I am not claiming the reverse, that all adjunction reflects an optional process, though it may very well be the case that all non-head adjunction reflects optional processes.
52
However, internal adjunction is the normal case for head-movement (following Roberts 2001, references therein, and especially the incorporation analysis of head-movement in Baker 1988). For this reason, it is extremely tempting to replace “non-head” with “element” in the definition in (17), and assert that the Conservation of C-Command can hold between two heads, as well as between heads and phtases. On the face of it, this would be a welcome result, since it would then be possible to derive the Head Movement Constraint (originally stated in Travis 1984) from the Conservation of C-Command, making illicit head- movement and illicit scrambling subcases of the same restriction. Under the assumption that head- movement is a type of adjunction, when a head moves, it must adjoin to another head, but it cannot leave the c-command domain of the next highest head in the tree. Therefore, its only available landing site is the next highest head itself: by (17), head-movement cannot skip c-commanding heads.
However, stating (17) in a way so as to include the HMC unfortunately appears to be too restrictive. First, syntactic cliticization has been widely considered a type of head-movement since at least Kayne (1991) and Chomsky (1995), but it does not necessarily obey the Head Movement Constraint: as Kayne (1991) argues for a number of Romance dialects, clitic pronouns can frequently head-move to pass V/v and adjoin to Tense in a number of contexts; something about their featural content, the featural content of Tense, and the (apparently irrelevant) featural content of V/v makes the necessary movement
actually enter the derivation by adjunction. This is probably the reason that scrambling has never fallen neatly into the A/A’ typology of movement (as I discuss in Chapter 8); it is an unusual type of movement, as it results in adjunction, and it is also an unusual type of adjunction, being derived by movement.
Note also that the statement in (17) derives the original “Holmberg’s Generalization” of Holmberg (1986) for the Scandinavian “object shift” languages: objects can scramble as far as the head that immediately c-commands them. If that head incorporates into another head by head-movement (following Baker 1988 and much subsequent work), then moving the object farther than the head’s original position does not remove the c-command relation between the head and the scrambled element as long is it is not scrambled past the new complex head.53
For the purposes of (17), I assume that traces of head-movement do not increase the total number of c-command relations in the tree; in other words, the trace does not constitute a second c-command relation between the same head and the nodes it c-commands. However, it is possible to to avoid the problem of traces altogether by restating the Conservation of C-Command in terms of the copy theory of movement (Chomsky 1993), in the following way:
directly to Tense without stopping at V/v. This may be predicted under an appropriate interpretation of Relativized Minimality (or its reformulation as Closest/Shortest Attract), in which the minimal domain for attraction of an element is determined based on the featural complexes of the intervening elements (as in Roberts 2001, Rizzi 1990, Rizzi 2001). Indeed, if the HMC can in fact be reduced to Relativized Minimality, as Rizzi asserts, then there is no need to try and reduce the HMC to the Conservation of C- Command, since Relativized Minimality is independently necessary as a component of the grammar. Additionally, there is evidence from Breton that there can be “long head movement” of verbs in some cases (Borsley et al 1996; also see the summary of work on long head movement in languages other than Breton). Under certain conditions, verbs in Breton are able to move and skip intervening heads, provided that the intervening head does not have the appropriate featural specification to be a landing site for the verb (cf. Roberts 1994). This fact can be accommodated under a precise, feature-based formulation of Relativized Minimality or Closest Attract, but would be ruled out if the Conservation of C-Command applied to head- movement under its current formulation.
53
I assume, I think uncontroversially, that the resulting complex head (“MWd” in Embick & Noyer 2001: 574) inherits the characteristics of all of the incorporated H0 heads.
(17’) A phrasal adjunct and all of copies resulting from the adjunction must be c-commanded by the same functional head.
According to the version of the constraint in (17’), traces of head-movement can clearly have no effect on scrambling. As long as the same functional head, including a complex head of which it is a part, c-commands all of the copies of a scrambled phrase at the end of the derivation, the fact that a trace of the head is lower than some of the copies is not relevant.
The statement of the Conservation of C-Command in terms of the copy theory of movement in (17’) is attractive on empirical grounds as well as on theoretical ground. Data such as the two German sentences below show that the landing sites for scrambling allowed by the Conservation of C-Command are not merely potential landing sites for a scrambled element, but rather that if an element scrambles to a high structural landing site, it must have moved cyclically through the intermediate potential landing sites. In other words, the scrambled constituent leaves a copy at every intervening maximal projection allowed by (17).
(18) Gestern hat [jeder Professor]i [jedem Studenten]j Yesterday has every-NOM professor i every-DAT student-DAT
seinei,j Dissertation gegeben hisi,j-ACC dissertation given
“Yesterday, every professori gave every studentj hisi,j dissertation.” (Lee & Santorini 1994: 286)
The sentence in (18), with the unscrambled order, is ambiguous between a reading in which the dissertations were written by the professors or the students; either the subject or the indirect object is available as a binder for the possessive pronoun in the direct object. However, when the direct object is scrambled over the subject, as in (19) below, one of the binding possibilities is eliminated.
(19) Gestern hat seinei,*j Dissertation [jeder Professor]i Yesterday has hisi,*j-ACC dissertation every-NOM professor i
[jedem Studenten]j gegeben every-DAT student-DAT given
“Yesterday, every professori gave every studentj hisi,*j dissertation.” (Lee & Santorini 1994: 286)
When the direct object containing the possessive is scrambled across the subject, it can reconstruct to be bound by the subject (as I discuss at length in Chapt. 8; cf. references there and the discussion of these examples in Lee & Santorini 1994). However, even though the direct object reconstructs to a position below the subject in (19), it reconstructs to a position above the indirect object, i.e. an intermediate landing site for scrambling. For this reason, it is clear that the direct object had to scramble to a position below the subject but above the indirect object, leaving a copy there, before it moved on to scramble above the subject. Since “short” scrambling below the subject never reconstructs, the indirect object can no longer bind the direct object once it has moved through a higher position on its way to moving above the subject. The subject thus binds the possessive in the direct object in a derived scrambling position, and this can only be accounted for under a theory in which scrambling leaves copies at each available landing
site as an element scrambles up the tree. Indeed, this result is predicted by Closest/Shortest Attract, combined with the copy theory of movement.