Probes and Their Horizons
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020
Language: eng
Number of pages: 380
ISBN-13: 9780262538275
Subjects: German language, syntax; Grammar, comparative and general, syntax; Urdu language
Description: "This monograph is the first book-length investigation of 'selective opacity'--configurations in which syntactic domains are opaque to some processes, but transparent to others--, and it develops a comprehensive theory of such configurations within a contemporary Minimalist framework. While such configurations have traditionally been analyzed in terms of restrictions on possible sequences of movement steps, the monograph shows that analogous restrictions govern long-distance dependencies that do not involve movement, and it proposes that the phenomenon is more widespread and abstract than previously assumed. The monograph develops a new approach to such effects, according to which probes are subject to characteristic 'horizons', which terminate their search. This analysis furthermore has important implications for key concepts of locality like the distribution of phases. The subject of the monograph falls within the fundamental domain of the locality of syntactic dependencies, with a specific focus on in-depth case studies of Hindi-Urdu and German. It contains detailed investigations of movement dependencies, long-distance agreement, wh-dependencies, the A/A'-distinction, restructuring, freezing effects, successive cyclicity, and phase theory. The intent of the monograph is to develop a comprehensive theory of selective-opacity effects within a Minimalist framework. As such, the monograph will be of interest to all linguists working on theoretical syntax in general and syntactic locality in particular. Furthermore, the in-depth case studies of Hindi-Urdu and German make it highly relevant to linguists interested in theoretical and/or empirical work on Indo-Aryan languages or Germanic"--