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Cartography is a research program within syntactic theory that studies the syntactic structures of a particular language in order to better understand the semantic issues at play in that language. The approach arranges a language's morpho-syntactic features in a rigid universal hierarchy, and its research agenda is to describe this hierarchy -- that is, to draw maps of syntactic configurations. Current work in cartography is both empirical -- extending the approach to new languages and new structures -- and theoretical. The 16 articles in this collection will advance both dimensions. They arise from presentations made at the Syntactic Cartography: Where do we go from here? colloquium held at the University of Geneva in June of 2012 and address three questions at the core of research in syntactic cartography: 1. Where do the contents of functional structure come from? 2. What explains the particular order or hierarchy in which they appear? 3. What are the computational restrictions on the activation of functional categories? Grouped thematically into four sections, the articles address these questions through comparative studies across various languages, such as Italian, Old Italian, Hungarian, English, Jamaican Creole, Japanese, and Chinese, among others.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Ur Shlonsky
- Part 1: The Articulation of Focus
- 1. Can the Metrical Structure of Italian Motivate Focus Fronting?
- Giuliano Bocci and Cinzia Avesani
- 2. The Focus Map of Clefts: Extraposition and Predication
- Adriana Belletti
- 3. Focus Fronting and the Syntax-Semantics Interface
- Valentina Bianchi
- 4. The Syntax of It-Clefts and the Left Periphery of the Clause
- Liliane Haegeman, André Meinunger, and Aleksandra Vercauteren
- 5. Focus and Wh in Jamaican Creole: Movement and Exhaustiveness
- Stephanie Durrleman and Ur Shlonsky
- Part 2: Word order, Features and Agreement
- 6. Word Orders in the Old Italian DP
- Cecilia Poletto
- 7. The CP/DP (Non-)Parallelism Revisited
- Christopher Laenzlinger
- 8. Cartography and Optional Feature Realization in the Nominal Expression
- Anna Cardinaletti and Giuliana Giusti
- 9. Czech Numerals and No Bundling
- Pavel Caha
- Part 3: The Left Periphery
- 10. Cartographic Structures in Diachrony. The Case of C-omission
- Irene Franco
- 11. Two ReasonPs: What Are*(n't) You Coming to US for?
- Yoshio Endo
- 12. Double Fronting in Bavarian Left Periphery
- Günther Grewendorf
- Part 4: Hierarchies and Labels
- 13. Cartography and Selection: Case Studies in Japanese
- Mamoru Saito
- 14. On the Topography of Chinese Modals
- Wei-Tien Dylan Tsai
- 15. The Clausal Hierarchy, Features and Parameters
- Theresa Biberauer and Ian Roberts
- 16. Cartography, Criteria, and Labeling
- Luigi Rizzi
About the author
Ur Shlonsky is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Geneva
Summary
The 16 articles in this collection will advance both empirical and theoretical work in cartography
