Restricting Accessibility to MERGE- A Deterministic Theory of Movement Toru Ishii (Meiji University)
The Minimalist Program, which seeks a “principled account” of all phenomena of humanlanguage, has the Strong Minimalist Thesis (SMT) as its core hypothesis (see, among others
Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2005, 2007).

The SMT claims that the computational system for humanlanguage should be a “perfect system,” meeting the interface conditions in a way that satisfies
the third factor principles, language-independent principles.

Among the third factor principles

are principles of efficient computation, which require that the computational system should berestricted to a minimum.

According to the SMT, therefore, the structure-building operation of

the computational system should be simple.

The simplest possible formulation is a set-formation that takes syntactic objects (SOs) X and Y, and forms {X, Y}, which is called Merge(see, among others Chomsky 1995, 2004, 2008, 2013, 2015).

Chomsky (2019a, b, c) andChomsky, Gallego, and Ott (2019) argue, however, that when we form exocentric constructions
like the subject-predicate construction, Merge must be allowed to construct SOs in parallel andbring them together somewhere.

This tacitly presupposes that there is a workspace (WS) in

which operations are carried out.

They propose that the right and simplest version of Merge

should be on WS, not on particular SO, and reformulate Merge as MERGE as an operation on
WS, where WS is taken to be the stage of a derivation at any given point as shown in (1):(1) MERGE maps WS = [X, Y] to WS' = [{X, Y}]
Chomsky (2019b, c) also argues that not only should the computational system be restricted toa minimum, but the resources available to the computational system, i.e. the set of elements
accessible to operations, should also be reduced to a minimum, which is called Resource
Restriction (RR).

Chomsky claims that RR includes both minimal search and the Phase

Impenetrability Condition (PIC).

He further argues that RR forces operations includingMERGE to be subject to the principle of Determinacy (2), though its exact formulations andconsequences are left untouched:(2) The Principle of Determinacy
If the structural conditions for a rule holds for some workspace, then thestructural change must be unique.

(Chomsky 2019a: 275)

This presentation proposes that RR should include only the PIC (but not minimal search)and that the principle of Determinacy should be formulated as a condition on the input ofMERGE:(3) a.

Restriction Resource (RR) only includes the Phase Impenetrability
Condition (PIC).

b.

Determinacy applies at the input of MERGE.

I argue that this proposal is theoretically desirable in that we can eliminate a redundancy between
minimal search and the PIC regarding accessibility and avoid a look-ahead property.

It is also

shown that the output-based principle of Determinacy coupled with the PIC gives us a unified
account of various movement phenomena like the subject condition, that-trace effects, novacuous topicalization, the freezing effects with topics, further raising, no superfluous steps in a
derivation, and anti-locality effects, which have been explained by different constraints orprinciples.
Selected References:
Chomsky, Noam. 2019a. Some puzzling foundational issues: The Reading program, Catalan Journal ofLinguistics, 263-285.
Chomsky, Noam. 2019b. Fundamental issues in linguistics, MIT lectures, April 10th and 12th.
Chomsky, Noam. 2019c. UCLA lectures, April 29th, 30th, May 1st, 2nd.
Chomsky, Noam, Ángel Gallego, and Dennis Ott. 2019. Generative grammar and the faculty of language:
Insights, questions, and challenges, Catalan Journal of Linguistics, 229-261.

Agentive vs. non-agentive encoding in causative event descriptions in English and Japanese
Kazuhiro Kawachi1, Erika Bellingham2, and Jürgen Bohnemeyer2
1: National Defense Academy of Japan, 2: State University of New York at Buffalo
According to Ikegami’s (1991) DO- vs. BECOME-language contrastive linguistics,DO-languages like English prefer to focus on and give linguistic prominence to the notion ofan agent, whereas BECOME-languages like Japanese tend to suppress this notion. Thus, DOlanguages show much more agentive, rather than non-agentive, encoding of events thanBECOME-languages.
There are experimental studies on causative event descriptions that tested thishypothesis. For example, Fausey et al. (2010) demonstrated that the difference between thetwo languages holds for accidental events, though not for intentional events.
The present study examines how English and Japanese speakers encode the caused subevent of a causative event. We had 12 native English speakers and 15 native Japanese speakers
orally describe 43 video clips depicting different types of causal events in their own language,
in answer to the question ‘What happened?’ and including a mention of what happened in theend.
Our results confirm Fausey et al.’s findings (Figure 1). Speakers of both English andJapanese frequently used agentive expressions to describe intentional events (e.g. (1), (2)), butfor accidental events, Japanese speakers produced much more non-agentive descriptions thanEnglish speakers (e.g. (3), (4)).
(1)

A man threw a soccer ball out of the room. (19: HO4_ball.mp4; ENG #S4)

(2)

Otoko nohitogabooru osotoninage-teman
GEN person NOM ball
ACC outside tothrow-CNV
das-imas-ita.
move.out(TR)-POLITE-PST‘The man threw the ball toward the outside, and moved it out.’ (19: HO4_ball.mp4; JPN #7)(3)

While doing a report, the newscaster backed up into somebody else and they fell off the boat.
(30: UM2_overboard; ENG #S5)(4)Intabyuu
os-iteiruto,baransu
ointerview
ACC do-CVB
exist when balance
ACC
kuzus-ite,usiro nii-ta
otoko nohito
ni
destroy-CVB back LOC exist-PSTman
GEN person to
butsukar-i,
otoko nohitowakawa nioti-mas-ita.
bump.into-ADVman
GEN person TOP river tofall-POLITE-PST‘When someone was doing an interview, they lost balance, bumped into a man behind them,and the man fell into the river.’ (30: UM2_overboard; JPN #11)

Nevertheless, our participants generally produced more non-agentive descriptions than Fausey
et al.’s, presumably because ours responded orally, unlike theirs, who typed their responses,
which is likely to have inclined them toward the production of more compact descriptions.
Moreover, for accidental events, our participants often used agentivity-lowering expressions
such as ‘accidentally’, ‘by accident’, ‘mistakenly’, or ‘unintentionally’ especially in English(24.0 % out of the agentive descriptions) (e.g. (5)) and simaw- ‘lit. put away’ in Japanese(76.9 % out of the agentive descriptions) (e.g. (6)) in agentive descriptions.
(5)

The guy with the microphone loses his balance and accidentally knocks the guy in the orange
over into the water. (30: UM2_overboard; ENG #S6)

(6)Migi nodansei ga
yoroke-te,
hidari nodansei oright GEN man
NOM stumble-CVB left
GEN man
ACCuminiotos-ite
sima-tta.
seatodrop-CVB
put.away-PST‘The man on the right stumbled, and unfortunately, he dropped the man on the left into the sea.’(30: UM2_overboard; JPN #10)

We also found non-agentive expressions were much more frequent in the Japanese data
than in the English data as descriptions of events with a natural force causer (e.g. wind, thunder)(e.g. (7), (8)) (Figure 2).
(7)

Ahh hah. A man was walking against the wind, a very strong wind, and ... as he was walking
he lost balance and fell down, and kinda slid away ... (6: NM2_reporter; ENG #ID6)(8)

Dansei ga,tsuyoi kaze noseide,koron-da.
man
NOM strong wind GEN blame COP.ADV
fall-PST‘The man fell because of a strong wind.’ (6: NM2_reporter; JPN #12)

This suggests that generally speaking, the two languages differ in the degree ofpreference for non-agentive expressions for describing low agentivity events. We furtherdiscuss low agentivity in the context of the (in)directness of causation, some factors of which
we found correlations with the degree of morphosyntactic integration in Kawachi et al. (2018,2020).
We also examine data from other languages including Kusapiny (Nilotic; Uganda) andSidaama (Cushitic; Ethiopia) to test to what extent our results support Ikegami’s (1991)
typological claim.

Figure 1: Use of agentive vs. non-agentive encoding
constructions to describe intentional and accidents
events in English and Japanese

Figure 2: Use of agentive vs. non-agentive encoding
constructions to describe natural-force causer eventsin English and Japanese

References
Fausey, Caitlin M, Bria L. Long, Aya Inamori, and Lera Boroditsky (2010) Constructing agency: The roleof language. Frontiers in Psychology, October 2010, Vol. 1, 1-11.
Ikegami, Yoshihiko (1991) ‘DO-language’ and ‘BECOME-language’: Two contrasting types of linguistic
representation. In Ikegami, Yoshihiko (ed.) The Empire of Signs: Semiotic Essays on JapaneseCulture, 285-326. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Kawachi, Kazuhiro, Erika Bellingham, and Jürgen Bohnemeyer (2018) Different types of causality andclause linkage in English, Japanese, Sidaama, and Yucatec Maya. Papers from the 18th National
Conference of the Japanese Cognitive Linguistics Association, 47–59.
Kawachi, Kazuhiro, Sang-Hee Park, and Erika Bellingham (2020) Directness of causation andmorphosyntactic complexity of constructions: Japanese and Korean cases. In Fukuda, Shin, Shoichi
Iwasaki, Sun-ah Jun, Sung-Ock Sohn, Susan Strauss, and Kie Zuraw (eds.) Japanese/KoreanLinguistics, Vol. 26. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

The Evolution of Language and Lexicon:
A Comparative Perspective
Koji Kawahara
Nagoya University of Foreign Studies
A widely held view about language is that it is the pre-eminent system of human beings. However, it is not generally agreed upon what constitutes language and what kind of components
are involved in it. An inﬂuential view in theoretical linguistics is that the faculty of language,
syntax in particular, is part of human’s biological endowment that makes language possible andis unique to human beings (Chomsky, 2005). Hauser et al. (2002) make a distinction between
the faculty of language in the narrow sense or FLN and the faculty of language in the broad
sense or FLB. According to this view, FLB includes a sensory-motor system, a conceptualintentional system and the computational mechanism of recursion and FLN only includes thelast one that is unique to human’s faculty of language. However, as Fujita (2016) argues, notonly the computational mechanism but also the other two systems are unique to humans andthus there is no reason to assume that the computational mechanism is special and that there
is no precursor for it. Since a decisive feature of human language is its ability to represent
concepts by combining them, precursors for the components of language should be sought inanimal cognition (Fitch, 2019).
The purpose of this talk is twofold. I will ﬁrst introduce the cognitive biological perspectiveon the evolution of language, claiming that the faculty of language is not special in that it
undergoes evolution as well as other species’ faculties but that it is unique to humans in that
other species do not use human language. Assuming the Merge only view hypothesis about
syntax and lexicon (Fujita, 2017), I will then discuss the proto-lexicon hypothesis that is basedon iconicity of language (Kawahara, 2020).

References
Chomsky, Noam (2005). Three factors in language design. Linguistic Inquiry 36. 1–22.
Fitch, Tecumseh W. (2019). Animal cognition and the evolution of human language: Why wecannot focus solely on communication. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B:
Biological Sciences https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0046.
Fujita, Koji (2016). On certain fallacies in evolutionary linguistics and how one can eliminate
them. In Fujita, Koji & Boeckx, Cedric (eds.), Advances in biolinguistics: The humanlanguage faculty and its biological basis, Routledge Publishers. 141–152.
Fujita, Koji (2017). On the parallel evolution of syntax and lexicon: A merge-only view. Journalof Neurolinguistics 43. 178–192.
Hauser, Marc D., Chomsky, Noam & Fitch, Tecumseh W. (2002). The faculty of language:
What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298. 1569–1579.
Kawahara, Koji (2020). The structure of language—human language vs. “animal language”—(gengo-no koozoo). Nagoya University of Foreign Language Press.