| description |
Jan-Wouter Zwart. 2009. Uncharted territory? Towards a non-cartographic account of Germanic syntax. In Artemis Alexiadou, Jorge Hankamer, Thomas McFadden, Justin Nuger, Florian Schäfer, eds., Advances in comparative Germanic syntax. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, p. 59-83. Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 141. |
| type | Peer reviewed volume chapter. |
| ID | 2009a | 128b | DOI | July 27, 2006; revisions July 28, 2008. |
| origin | Invited lecture at the 21st Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop, Santa Cruz, April 2, 2006. Elements of the "flexible" approach to syntactic structure contemplated here were implicit in my dissertation and are made more explicit here in response to a critical discussion of that work in a 1999 Utrecht MA-thesis by Pia Schrijnemakers. This work also came out of a project on the multiple specifier hypothesis, funded by NWO (1998-2001). |
| keywords | Germanic syntax; flexible syntax; cartography; clause structure |
| summary | This article discusses the consequences of a strict derivational approach--where syntactic relations are construed dynamically as the derivation proceeds--to the analysis of key areas of Germanic syntax. It discusses the nature of syntactic positions from a non-cartographic point of view. Evidence supporting a non-cartographic approach is found in word order transitivity failures in various domains (the left periphery, the order of adverbs, the adjective-noun construction). The implications of a non-cartographic approach are discussed in four key areas of Germanic syntax (the fine structure of the left periphery, topicalization/focalization, subject placement and object placement). |
| related |
full text Publications: earlier Dutch version, prepublication Presentations: CGSW, 04/2006 Projects: NWO, 1998-2001. |
