Linguistics

Assignment to hand in May 20th.

Radford Ch. 5
Answer these questions briefly.
1- What evidence does Radford present in favor of the copy theory of movement?
2- Explain the Head Strength Parameter using examples from Elizabethan and from
Modern Standard English?
3- Is there any connection between the morphology of a language and the value of
some of the parameters? Explain.
4- Why would it be inadequate to analyse “not” as spec of VP? (see p. 170)
5- What seems to be the historical antecedent of the neg adverb “not “ in spec of
Neg Phrase?
6- When does affix hopping apply? When is do-support applied?
7- Is the auxiliary “do” visible in the semantic component? Is it visible in the
phonological component?
8- Draw a tree for:Did he win the race? /He didn’t win the race /Win the race, he
did.
9- Make a comment about the Noun Movement parameter in English and in Italian
(or Spanish) on the basis of :
the Italian invasion of Albania and l’invasione italiana dell’Albania.
Chapter 6:
Draw trees for :
a)Where will she stay ?
b) What proof have you found that he is the thief ? (discontinous spellout)
c)Account for the ambiguity of the following sentence by drawing 2 trees:
Joe wonders which picture of himself Jim bought
d) Which 2 kinds of merger operation do you know? (p.189)
e) Account for the ungrammaticality of :
*I wonder what has done who.
f) Features of C: what features does C have in root wh-questions and in indirect w-
questions?
g)Draw a tree for each of the following sentences(using all the features that you already
know):
Which books has he read?
Which books did he try to read?
Who directed the film?
Radford Ch. 5

1) What evidence does Radford present in favor of the copy theory of movement?

The assumption that movement is a composite operation involving two

suboperations of copying and deletion is the cornerstone of Chomsky’s theory of
movement.
The first of the two suboperations, the copying component of the movement,
entails a form of merger operation by which a copy of the constituent which has
already been merged in one position is subsequently merged in another position. The
second suboperation involves the deletion of the phonetic feature of the original
occurrence of the component that has been copied and re- merged.
Some evidence in support of the composite nature of the copy theory of
movement comes from the study of language acquisition. These samples of speech were
produced by a 2 year old boy:
1) a) Can its wheels can spin?
a) Is the steam is hot?
b) Was that was Anna?

These questions show that the boy seems to have mastered the copy-merge
component of auxiliary inversion and so is able to merge a copy of can/ is/ was in C;
but he has not yet mastered the copy-deletion component of auxiliary inversion and
so fails to delete the phonetic features of the original occurrence of the auxiliary in
T.

More evidence to support the theory comes from the phenomenon of have-
cliticisation. The auxiliary have can encliticise onto a pronoun that asymmetrically
c-commands have if there is no intervening separating have from the pronoun. In
these examples the cliticisation of have onto the pronoun is blocked:
2) a) Should they have/ *they’ve called the police?
b) Will we have/ *we’ve finished the rehearsals by 9pm?
c) Could I have/ *I’ve done something to help?

The reason why this is so is that when an inverted auxiliary moves from T to
C, it leaves behind a null copy of itself in the T position out of which it moves. E.g.:
“Should they should have called the police?” This null auxiliary (in our example,
should) intervenes between the pronoun and the auxiliary have, thus blocking have-
cliticisation.

2) The setting of the Head Strength Parameter determines whether a given kind of
head is strong and can thus trigger movement of a lower head to attach to it, or
weak and so cannot attract a lower head to move to attach to it.
In Elizabethan English, finite T was strong and so it must be filled: the T
contained a Tns affix with a strong V-feature which required the affix to have an
auxiliary or non auxiliary verb attached to it as host. So, in a structure such as I care not
for her, the strong (first person-singular- present- tense) Tns affix in T is provided with a
host by attracting the closest verb it c-commands (ie. the verb care) from its V position
to move to T and attach to the Tns affix, so that the affix is provided with a verbal host
via movement.
 Thus: I care not care for her.

By contrast, T in Modern Standard English contains an affix with a weak V-

feature, and that’s why it cannot attract a verb to move from V to T, but rather can
only be attached to a verbal host either by merger of an auxiliary with the null Tns
affix in T, or, in auxiliarless clauses, by lowering of the Tns affix onto the main verb.
The latter is a morphological operation known as Affix Hopping and it is realized in
the PF component.
E.g.: He enjoy [+Tns 3sgPr] the classes.

3) The work of several linguists (Platzack and Holmberg 1989, Roberts 1993 et al.)
suggests that the relative strength or weakness of a tense affix is correlated with
the relative richness of the system of subject-agreement which it encodes. So, a
tense affix is strong in a language in which finite auxiliaries and verbs carry rich
agreement inflections and weak in languages in which finite auxiliaries and verbs
carry impoverished subject-agreement inflections. This would explain why in
Elizabethan English the Tns affix was strong and in present-day English it is weak.
Compared to the only regular agreement inflection –s found on (present tense) verbs
in Modern Standard English, Elizabethan English presented four present tense
inflections: second-person-singular –st, third-person-singular –th or –s and third
person plural –n.
The relative richness of the agreement features carried by finite verbs in
Elizabethan English also affected the value of the null-subject parameter. Whereas
present day English is a non-null subject language (in the sense that it doesn't allow the
subject to be omitted), Elizabethan English was a null-subject language, and hence
allowed finite verbs and finite auxiliaries to have null subjects. E.g.:
a) Sufficeth, I am come to keep my word (Petruchio, The Taming of the Shrew, III,
ii)
b) Lives, sir (iago, Othello, IV, I, in reply to “How does Lieutenant Casio?”)
c) Hast any more of this? (Trinculo, The Tempest, II, ii)
d) You must be so too, if heed me (Antonio, The Tempest, II, i)

4) Because only an argument of a verb can occupy the specifier VP position and not in a
sentence like She may not sell it is not an argument of the verb sell (i.e. It's not one of
the participants in the act of selling).