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One-replacement and the label-less theory of adjuncts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Yosuke Sato*
Affiliation:
National University of Singapore

Extract

The proper treatment of adjuncts has been a central issue in syntactic theory since the 1980s. In the X'-theoretic analysis in the Government and Binding (GB) Theory (Chomsky 1981, 1986), they were commonly treated as optional elements attached to an intermediate or maximal projection of the head they modify. However, this treatment has been shown to be no longer tenable in the more recent Bare Phrase Structure (BPS) Theory for several conceptual reasons (Chomsky 1995: ch. 4), which renders the status of adjuncts all the more puzzling. Recently, however, Hornstein and Nunes (2008) (henceforth H&N) have proposed a new theory of adjuncts that conforms to the precepts of the BPS. It proposes that adjuncts need not be labeled for purposes of syntactic computation in contrast to complements and specifiers, which require the result of concatenation to be labeled. This squib presents new evidence for H&N's theory from one-replacement.

Type
Squibs Notules
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association/Association canadienne de linguistique 2010 

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