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Some thoughts on language diversity, UG and the importance of language typology scrambling and non-monotonic merge of adjuncts and specifiers in Czech and German

  • The following article is concerned with the problem of language diversity within the framework of Radical Minimalism (Krivochen 2011, 2012). How can the diversity and variation of languages be explained? For Noam Chomsky, language faculty in the narrow sense (FLN) is nothing but an "organ of the body,' along with other cognitive systems. Our analysis of human language builds on Chomsky's (1995, 2005, 2010) minimalist assumption that the design of language is grounded in conceptual necessity. Adopting this idea, we expect to find three factors that interact to determine (I-) languages attained: genetic endowment (the topic of Universal Grammar), experience, and principles that are language- or even organism-independent." (Chomsky 2005:1). In the present article we provide some ideas about how generative research based on Radical Minimalism can contribute on a par with the typology of languages to a more profound and sound exploration of language variation. The scope of the paper is to compare the distribution of adverbs within theThe following article is concerned with the problem of language diversity within the framework of Radical Minimalism (Krivochen 2011, 2012). How can the diversity and variation of languages be explained? For Noam Chomsky, language faculty in the narrow sense (FLN) is nothing but an "organ of the body,' along with other cognitive systems. Our analysis of human language builds on Chomsky's (1995, 2005, 2010) minimalist assumption that the design of language is grounded in conceptual necessity. Adopting this idea, we expect to find three factors that interact to determine (I-) languages attained: genetic endowment (the topic of Universal Grammar), experience, and principles that are language- or even organism-independent." (Chomsky 2005:1). In the present article we provide some ideas about how generative research based on Radical Minimalism can contribute on a par with the typology of languages to a more profound and sound exploration of language variation. The scope of the paper is to compare the distribution of adverbs within the three domains of the clause in Czech and German. The aim of this paper is to show that the feature-based theory of adverb licensing is not able to handle the problem of adverb order variation. Instead, a more parsimonious approach based on the Theory of Radical Minimalism will be chosen. The paper is organized as follows: After some remarks on the role of Universal Grammar, Variation and Typology in section 1, section 2 introduces the theoretical background by introducing the principles and the core of Radical Minimalism, e.g. free unbounded merge, asymmetric c-command and the restrictions within the clause structure composition. In section 3, the distribution of adverbs in the middle field is discussed for Czech and German. In the last part, we introduce the so-called Late Adjunction Hypothesis that results in similar effects to the Early Spell-Out model argued for in our paper.show moreshow less

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Author details:Peter KostaORCiDGND, Diego Gabriel Krivochen
ISSN:0044-3506
Title of parent work (English):Zeitschrift für Slawistik
Publisher:De Gruyter
Place of publishing:Berlin
Publication type:Article
Language:English
Year of first publication:2012
Publication year:2012
Release date:2017/03/26
Tag:Multiple Spell-Out; Radical Minimalism; Scrambling of Adverbial Phrases; Strong Minimalist Thesis; Universal Grammar; Variation
Volume:57
Issue:4
Number of pages:31
First page:377
Last Page:407
Organizational units:Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik
Peer review:Referiert
Institution name at the time of the publication:Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Linguistik / Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
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