TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kosta, Peter
A1  - Krivochen, Diego Gabriel
T1  - 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
JF  - Zeitschrift für Slawistik
N2  - 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 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.
KW  - Universal Grammar
KW  - Variation
KW  - Scrambling of Adverbial Phrases
KW  - Strong Minimalist Thesis
KW  - Radical Minimalism
KW  - Multiple Spell-Out
Y1  - 2012
SN  - 0044-3506
VL  - 57
IS  - 4
SP  - 377
EP  - 407
PB  - De Gruyter
CY  - Berlin
ER  -