Movement, islands and the ECP

Some papers reset the research agenda. This one by Lu and Yoshida (L&Y), I believe, is one of those (here is a slide conveying the basic point. The paper is under submission at LI and I assume it will be accepted and rapidly published (if not this is will tell us more about LI than it will about the quality of this paper)). The topic is the island status of Wh-in-situ (WIS) constructions in Chinese. The finding is that using judgment studies of the Sprouse experimental syntax (ES) variety provides evidence for two stunning conclusions: (i) that WISs respect islands and (ii) that there is no evidence for an argument/adjunct distinction wrt WISs. Both data points are theoretically pregnant and this post will largely concentrate on drawing out some of the implications. Many of these are mentioned in the paper (yup, I have a draft), so are not original with me. Let’s start.

L&Y is motivated by the premise that ES provides a useful tool for the refining linguistic judgments. The idea, as Sprouse has convincingly argued, is that grammatical complexity should induce a super-additivity effect in well-constructed judgment experiments (see, e.g. here and here for discussion and here for a nice review of the methodology). Importantly, super-additivity profiles arise in cases where less involved rating studies find nothing indicating un-grammaticality.

Before pressing on, let’s make an important and obvious point: all GGers distinguish (or should distinguish) acceptability from grammaticality. Acceptability is a probe for grammaticality. Acceptability is an observable property of utterances. Grammaticality is an abstract property of I-linguistic mental representations. Grammaticality is inferred from acceptability under the right conditions (given the right controls as realized by the appropriate minimal pairs). All of this is old hat, but a still very stylish and durable hat. 

Happily, for most of what we have done in GG, acceptability closely tracks grammaticality, but we also know that the two notions can and do diverge (see here for some discussion). ES is particularly useful for cases where this happens and the simple judgment elicitation procedure (e.g. ask a native speaker) indicates all is well. Diogo Almeida has dubbed cases of the latter “subliminal.” One of ES’s important contributions to syntax has been the discovery of such subliminal effects (SE), SEs being cases where ES procedures reveal super-additivity effects while more regular elicitation suggests grammaticality. So, for example, we now have many examples where standard elicitation has indicated that a certain dependency in a certain language shows no island sensitivity (i.e. the sentences are judged (highly) acceptable) while ES techniques indicate sensitivity to these same island effects (i.e. the relevant data display super-additivity effects).

We also find the converse: standard techniques indicating a profound difference in acceptability, while ES techniques showing nothing at all.[1]All in all then, ES has provided a useful additional kind of data, one that is often more sensitive to G structure than the quick and dirty (and largely accurate and hence very useful) standard judgment techniques, which sometimes fail to track these. 

So, back to the main point: L&Y is an ES study of WISs in Chinese and it has two important findings: that allWISs in Chinese exhibit relative clause island effects (henceforth RCI) (i.e. they alldisplay the super-additivity profile) and that there is no ES evidence that long “why” movement from an RCI is appreciably worse than long “why” movement absent an RCI (i.e. these cases when contrasted do not show a super-additvity profile). The first result argues that WISs are island sensitive and the second argues that there is no additional ECP effect distinguishing WISs like who/what from WISs like why. If correct, this is very big news, and, IMO, very welcome news. Let me say why.

First, as L&Y emphasizes, this result rules out most of the standard approaches to WIS constructions. In particular the result rules out two kinds of theories: (i) accounts that distinguish between overt movement vs covert movement (e.g. Huang’s) and treat island effects as effectively reflexes of overt movement (say, via a chain condition at SS) and (ii) theories that postulate two different kinds of operations (Movement vs Binding) to license WISs with movement subject to islands and binding exempt from them (as in, say, a Rizzi-Cinque approach to ECP effects). Both such kinds of theories will have problems with the apparent fact that WISs induce super-additivity effects.

It is worth noting, furthermore, that the sensitivity of WISs to islands is not the only example of apparent non-movement generated structures being island compliant. The same holds wrt resumptive pronoun (RP) constructions. These also appear to respect islands despite the absence of the main hallmark of movement (i.e. a gap in the “movement” site).[2]Both this RP data and now the WIS data point to the same conclusion: that island effects are notPF effects.[3]From my reading of the literature, this is the most popular current approach to islands and it has some terrifically interesting evidence in support (in particular the fact that some ellipsis (i.e. sluicing) obviates island violations). However, if L&Y are right, then we may have to rethink this assumption (see note 3 however).

Indeed, I would go further (and here it is NH speaking rather than L&Y). There have long been two general approaches to islands. 

First, we have Chomsky’s view of subjacency elaborated in ‘On wh movment’ that treats islands as reflecting bounds on the computational procedure. Island effects reflect the subjacency condition (aka PIC), which bounds the domain of computation (an idea motivated by the reasonable assumption that bounding a domain of computation makes doing computations more tractable).[4]

The second approach can be traced back to Ross’s thesis (islands restrict chopping rules) but has been developed as part of the linearization industry spurred by Kayne’s seminal work and mooted most explicitly by Uriagereka.[5]

The L&Y results argue pretty strongly, IMO, for Chomsky’s original conception precisely because they appear to hold whether or not the construction involves an obvious phonetic gap (gaps being problematic as they undo linearizations). If this is so, then it argues against linearization based approaches to the problem (leaving, of course a very big question: what to do about sluicing).[6]

We can go further still. The L&Y results also argue for a Merge only syntax. Here is what I mean. IMO, the central empirical thesis of the Minimalist Program (MP) is the Merge Hypothesis (MH). MH is the claim that the only specifically linguistic operation of FL is Merge. This entails that allG dependencies are merge mediated. The strong version of the thesis excludes operations like long distance Agree, which spans the same domains as I-merge but is a different operation. Note that it is natural to suppose that I-merge is movement and Agree is some kind of binding or feature sharing. At any rate, the classical conceptions gain empirical benefit from the “observation” that WISs do not display island effects. Why? Because, we might say, they are licensed by Agree not by I-merge and only the latter (being the MP analogue of movement) is subject to subjacency (or its current analogue). But as L&Y indicates this is precisely the wrong conclusion. WISs are subject to islands. A merge only syntax insists that all A’-dependencies are formed in the same way, via I-Merge, as this as the only way to establish any non-local grammatical dependency. So if WISs are G licensed, then they must be G licensed via I-merge and so will form a natural class with overt Wh movement. And this is what L&Y find. Both show super-additivity effects across islands. Thus, L&Y’s findings are what we should expect from a merge only syntax and it cautions against larding this best of MP theories with Agree/Probe-Goal titivations.[7]

We can milk a second important conclusion from L&Y. It solves a giant problem for MP. Which problem? The problem of unifying subjacency with the ECP. I have suggested elsewhere (see here) that the argument/adjunct asymmetries at the heart of the ECP are very MP problematic. This is so for a variety of reasons. The three that move me most are the fact that the ECP is a trace licensing condition and MP eschews traces, the huge theoretical redundancy between ECP and subjacency, and the “ugliness” of the basic technical machinery required to allow the ECP to track the argument/adjunct asymmetry. One of the nice implications of L&Y is that we need not worry about the problems that the ECP generates for MP because the theoretical apparatus is based on a mistaken description of the data. If L&Y is right, then there is no argument/adjunct asymmetry. Poof, the MP problem disappears and with it the ad-hoc theoretically unmotivated (within MP) technical apparatus required to track it.  

Of course, this overstates matters. It behooves us to go over the ECP data more carefully and see how to resolve the difference in acceptability that the standard literature identified. Why after all if all Whs are created equal do long distance adjuncts resist movement more fiercely than do long distance arguments?[8]L&Y offer a suggestion (no spoiler from me, read the squib when it comes out). But whatever the right answer is, it does not rest on making an invidiousgrammaticaldistinction between the two kinds of dependencies. And this is just what MP needs in order to start distinguishing ECP effects from the ECP theoretical apparatus in GB.

Let me hit this a bit harder. The ugliest parts of theories of A’-dependency within GB arise in response to argument/adjunct asymmetry effects. The technical machinery in Barriers (built on Lasnik and Saito foundations), though successful empirically (IMO, Lasnik and Saito’s theory was considerably more empirically effective than Barriers) had little of the virtual conceptual necessity MPers pine for. Nor were alternative theories (Generalized Binding, Connectedness) much prettier. Nonetheless, we put up with that stuff and developed it theoretically because it appeared to be empirically called for. The right aesthetic conclusion should have been (and actually was) that it was too contrived to be correct. L&Y provides courage for our aesthetic convictions. We should have judged these theories as suspect because ugly, though we would have been empirically premature in drawing that conclusion. Given L&Y, the facts are not what we took them to be despite reflecting very different acceptability profiles. 

There is a moral here, and you can all guess what it is but I cannot resist making it explicit anyhow. L&Y provide evidence for a methodological precept that we fail to respect enough: facts can change, no less than theory can. Or to put this another way: just as we can make theoretical wrong turns that we come to revise, we can adopt empirical generalizations that turn out to be misleading. The standard view is that data is hard and theory is fluffy and when the two clash it is best to revise the theory than rethink the data. L&Y provides a case where this is reversed. And I say hooray!

Let me make one more point and I will end this overly long post (long, and yet, filled with endlessly many loose ends). L&Y exemplifies something that I think is important. It is an empirical paper whose purpose is to directlytest a core theoretical assumption. This is not something that we generally see within syntax. Most papers are not out to test theoretical assumptions. Most papers use theory to explore more data. Theory might be tested but it is generally a by-product of better descriptive coverage. L&Y works differently. It starts from the theory and constructs an empirical intervention to probe it. Moreover, the question is quite precise and the assumptions required to answer it are clear within the confines of the project. This has all the look and smell of an honest to god experiment, a process whereby we query the theory using a relatively well-understood probe. Both empirical methods of exploration are worthwhile, but they are different and it is only relatively recently, I think, that we are seeing examples of the second experimental kind gaining traction. 

Curiously (perhaps), a feature of this second kind of paper is that the paper is short. L&Y is a squib. Empirical explorations in linguistics often read like novellas. L&Y is very definitely a very very short story. I would like to suggest that experimental papers like L&Y reflect the scientific health of linguistics. It is now possible to ask a sharp question, and give a sharp answer. We need more of these kinds of short pointed experimental forays into the data starting from well-formulated theoretical starting points.

That’s it. I have gone on far too long. L&Y is terrific. If correct, it is very important. I personally hope the results stand up. It would go a long way to cleaning up a particularly untidy part of syntactic theory and thereby further vindicating the promise of MP, indeed a particularly strong version of MP, one that endorses a Merge only conception of grammar.

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[1]ES techniques have, for example, suggested that adjunct island effects might not be of a piece with other islands as they (often) fail to display super-additivity effects.

[2]To be slightly more careful and squinting at the ES results wrt resumptives the following is more accurate: resumptives uniformly ameliorate fixed subject constraint violations but note “mere” subjacency violations. Thus, resumptives inside islands seem to show the same super-additvity profiles as their moved counterparts.

[3]Perhaps a more felicitous way of putting matters is that RPs and WISs are also products of I-merge and so expected to be subject to islands. One reason for treating islands as PF effects is to capture the distinctionbetween these cases and more conventional examples of overt movement. If, however, they pattern the same then the motivation for treating islands as PF effects weakens. This said, I am pretty sure it is possible to model these cases as formed via movement/I-merge by, for example, treating them as cases of remnant movement, the moved Wh or Q morpheme starts as part of a doubled structure including the RP or WIS. 

[4]See Chomsky’s ‘On wh movement’ for discussion. See herefor more prose.

[5]Versions of this original idea were developed by many people including Hornstein, Lasnik and Uriagereka, and Fox and Pesetsky. The idea centers on the idea that the problem with movement is that it reorders elements and so can come into conflict with the ordering algorithm. In this sense, gaps are a big deal and what distinguish movement from other kinds of long distance dependencies like binding.

[6]Or again, it argues for treating the operation (e.g. movement) as in need of constraint rather than the output of the operation (a gap, or new linear order). What plausibly unifies cases of “overt” WH (as in English), “covert” WH (as in Chinese) and resumptive WH (as in Hebrew) is that they all involve relating an A’ element to a non-local syntactic position that can be arbitrarily far away. IT’s the span that seems to matter, not what sits at the tail of the chain.

[7]RP constructions must also be formed via I-merge and so too all forms of binding. This requirement fits well with the observation that RPs obey islands. Binding, especially pronominal binding, is likely to be more problematic. As they say at this point in a journal paper in reply to referee 2; these are topics for further research.

[8]As I have noted in other places, this description of the ECP contrast is not quite correct, as we have known since Rizzi’s work on minimality. The distinction seems less a matter of argument vs adjunct than object centered vs non object centered quantification. But this is a topic for another time.

Bad science vs scientism

Here are a pair of papers (here,here) that discuss scientism. Scientism is hard to define exactly for it relies on being able to distinguish what is scientific from what is not and those that think that some piece of work is scientistic also generally think that demarcating science from non-science is a mug’s game. The longer paper is by Susan Haack. The shorter is a comment by Andrew Gelman who adds a codicil to her 6 distinguishing features. Here is Haack’s list:

1. Using the words “science,” “scientific,” “scientifically,” “scientist,” etc., honorifically, as generic terms of epistemic praise.

2. Adopting the manners, the trappings, the technical terminology, etc., of the sciences, irrespective of their real usefulness.

3. A preoccupation with demarcation, i.e., with drawing a sharp line between genuine science, the real thing, and “pseudo-scientific” imposters.

4. A corresponding preoccupation with identifying the “scientific method,” presumed to explain how the sciences have been so successful.

5. Looking to the sciences for answers to questions beyond their scope.

6. Denying or denigrating the legitimacy or the worth of other kinds of inquiry besides the scientific, or the value of human activities other than inquiry, such as poetry or art.

Gelman adds a distinction between active vs passive scientism. Here’s how he elaborates this distinction:

A familiar examples of passive scientism is “pizzagate”: the work, publication, and promotion, of the studies conducted by the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University. Other examples include papers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on himmicanes, air rage, and ages ending in 9.

In all these cases, topics were being studied that clearly can be studied by science. So the “scientism” here is not coming into the decision to pursue this research. Rather, the scientism arises from blind trust in various processes associated with science, such as randomized treatment assignment, statistical significance, and peer review.

In this particular manifestation of scientism—claims that bounce around between scientific journals, textbooks, and general media outlets such as NPR and Ted talks—there is no preoccupation with identifying the scientific method or preoccupation with demarcation, but rather the near-opposite, an all-too-calm acceptance of wacky claims that happen to be in the proximity to various tokens of science.

I am not sure that what Gelman notes constitutes a natural kind with what Haack is worried about. Moreover, I think that the distinction is worth preserving if for no other reason that we need to allow for badscience, which is what Gelman is really pointing at. Bad science is science badly done and one can do things badly in a variety of ways, including in a way that rightly irks Gelman: “blind trust in various processes associated with science.”But this is still different from what Haack is trying to dissect which is more along the lines of a category mistake: the extension of scientific methods and modes of discussion into domains where they don’t really apply so as to join the slip stream of prestige that scientific inquiry enjoys.  The difference between scientism and bad science is sorta like the difference between bullshit and lies. Both are bad but they are not quite the same thing.

But once we are cataloguing, let me add one of my own pet peeves: the refusal to actually criticize what is being asserted. FoL has canvassed many “debates” wherein critics have attacked a position that nobody defended. Dan Everett on universals is a classic example of a “debate” based on a pun. But there are many others as well. A kissing cousin of this is the “refutations” of PoS arguments for one or another conclusion where the critic often has no idea what the PoS argument consists in. I would think that a useful rule of scientific method is to make sure that you read and understand that which you are objecting to. But the ubiquity of “critiques” and “refutations” that ignore this simple principle suggests that I would be wrong to think so.

I have been privy to a more recent version of this kind of criticism. For the last several years I have been arguing that Minimalism has been a tremendous success when evaluated in its own terms.  The papers and presentations that try to make this case lay out what I take the Minimalist project to be and how various proposals have succeeded in illuminating the questions it poses for itself. In particular, the project is to explain why we have the FL/UG we do and this project only makes sense given certain presuppositions and judgments (e.g. the project is decidedly mentalistic, it presupposes that many of the laws of grammar that GB style theories have discovered are roughly accurate, etc.). Most of my presentations spend a large amount of time spelling out these presuppostions and judgments and explaining how giventhese, Minimalism has offered plausible and defensible answers to the questions identified. I even make the point that ifone rejects these presuppositions or has made different empirical judgments regarding the presupposed facts that the Minimalist project as outlined will not appear particularly appealing. And I often add that there is no disputing taste (here I am being concessive, for I think that this is false) but that this is not relevant to the evaluation of the project’s achievements. And what does this get me? Mostly very little. Here is what I mean.

More often than not this does not satisfy everyone who reads the paper or attends the lecture. I cannot imagine why for as indicated I am always perfectly persuasive, gregarious, open-minded and mentally flexible. Still, I often fail. Why? Because so far as I can tell many just don’t like the very idea of the Minimalist project and think that working on such a project is illegitimate. Of course one cannot just assert “I just don’t like Minimalism!” and declare “Nor should anybody else!” because saying these sorts of things will make one sound like a crank. So, to avoid sounding like a petulant whack-job an MP hater will typically reach for generic criticisms (e.g. it’s not methodologically scientific, its ideologically driven, look at all the problems, etc.) that do not in any obvious way tie up to the premises defended or the arguments proffered. And this is, IMO, unkosher science. It’s fine not to like something. It’s fine to follow your gut. It’s fine to openly sneer at the taste of others (ok, that is notfine, but at least it can he done honestly). But it is not fine to pretend to offer criticism that seems based on reasons but is actually based on either ignorance, petulance, or mental indigestion. This is simple bad faith. And, sad to say, IMO, there is a lot of this in the sciences in general, and even in parts of contemporary linguistics. 

So what would I add to the Haack-Gelman discussion. I would add that there is a lot of junk science out there and much of it is driven by bad faith. This bad faith is illustrated by a refusal to address the actual arguments being made. And this is not a great thing.

Classical and dependent case

This is a long rambling post. It has been a way for me to clarify my own thoughts. here goes.

Every year I co-teach the graduate syntax 2 course at UMD. It follows Howard Lasnik’s classic intro to syntax that takes students from LSLT/Syntactic Structures to roughly the early 1990s, just before the dawn of the Minimalist Program (MP) (personal note: it is perhaps the greatest intro class I have ever had the pleasure to sit in on). Syntax 2 takes the story forward starting with early MP and going up to more or less the present day. 

For most of the last 10 years, I have taught this course with someone else. The last several years I have had Omer Preminger as wingman (or maybe, more accurately, I have been hiswingman) and it has been delightfully educational. He is a lot of fun to argue with. I am not sure that I have come out victorious even once (actually I am but my self- confidence doesn’t allow such a bald admission), but it has been educational and exhilarating. And because he is an excellent teacher, I learn at least as much as the other students do. Why do I mention this? It’s all in service of allowing me to discuss something that arose from Omer’s class discussion of case theory over the last several years and that I hope will provoke him to post something that will help me (and I suspect many others) get clear what the “other” theory of case, Dependent Case Theory (DCT), takes its core empirical and theoretical content to be. 

To help things along, I will outline oneversion of DCT, observe some obvious problems for that interpretation and note another version (spurred by Omer’s remarks in the Syntax 2 class). By way of contrast, I will outline what I take the core features of classical case theory (CCT) to be and, at the end, I will explain why I personally am still a partisan CCT despite the many problems that beset it.[1]So here goes. I start with CCT as background theory.

CCT is primarily a theory of the distribution of lexical nominals (though what “counts” as lexicalis stipulated (phonetically overt material always does, some traces might (A’-traces) and some traces never do (A-traces and maybe PRO)). The theory takes the core licensing relation to be of the X⁰-YP variety, some set of heads licensing the presence of some set of DPs. CCT, as Vergnaud conceived it, is intended, in the first instance,to unify/reduce the various filters that Chomsky and Lasnik (1977) proposed. The core assumptions are that (i) nominals require case and (ii) certain heads have the power to assign case. Together these two assumptions explain that we find nominals in positions where heads can case mark them. 

Overt morphological case marking patterns no doubt influenced Vergnaud. However, given that CCT was intended to apply to languages like English and French and Chinese where many/most nominals show no apparent case morphology, it was understood from the get-go that CCT’s conception of case was abstract, in the sense that it is present and regulates the distribution of lexical nominals even when it is morpho-phonologically invisible. This abstractness, and the fact that case lives on a head-XP relation are the two central characteristics of the CCT in what follows.

GB extended the empirical reach of CCT beyond the distribution of nominals by making a second assumption. Assume that abstract case can be morphologically realized. In particular, if it is assumed that in grammars/languages with richer morphological case, the core structuralcases (nominative, accusative, etc.)[2]can be made visible then in these languages case theory can explain why some expressions have the morpho-phonological shapes they do. Adding this codicil allows CCT to claim that case marked nominals look as they do in virtue of overtlyexpressing the abstractcases nominals bear universally.[3]

In sum, CCT covers two domains of data: the original explicandum is the distribution of lexical nominals, the second is the morpho-phonological forms found in richer case languages. Importantly, this second empirical domain requires an extra assumption concerning the relationship between abstract case and its morpho-phonological(henceforth ‘overt’) expression. Usefully, these two parts of the theory allow for the investigation of abstract case by tracking the properties of the overtly marked nominals in those languages where it can be seen (e.g. the pronominal system in English).

CCT has other relevant (ahem) subtleties. 

First, it primarily concerns structuralcase. This contrasts with inherent/lexicalcase, which is tied to particular thematic or semantic roles and is idiosyncratically tied to the specific lexical predicates assigning the roles.[4]For example, some languages, most famously Icelandic, have predicates that require that their nominal arguments have a particular overt case marking (dative or genitive or even accusative). 

CCT has almost always distinguished inherent from lexical case, though the two bear some similarities. For example, both are products of head-XP relations (lexical case piggy backing on theta roles which, like case, are assigned by heads). That said, CCT has generally put lexical case to one side and has concentrated on the structural ones, those unrelated to any thematic function.[5]

Second, MP slightly revamped the CCT. The contemporary version takes structural case to alwaysbe a dependency between a functionalhead and an XP  while lexical case, as the name implies, is alwaysmediated by a lexical head. This differs from earlier GB accounts where nominative is assigned by a functional head (finite T) but accusative is assigned by a lexical V (or P) which also, typically (modulo ECM constructions) theta marks the nominal it case assigns. Thus, MP assimilates accusative to the nominative configuration and takes structural accusative, like nominative, to involve a non-local dependency between a functional head (one that does not theta mark the dependent) and a nominal that is not a complement. The relevant functional head for accusative is Agror some flavor of v. What’s crucial is that in MP accounts the case assigner is always significantly “higher” in the phrase marker and so the dependency must be mediated by AGREE or I-Merge (aka, Move). The most interesting consequence of this amendment to the CCT is the consequence that case should affect scope.[6]Surprisingly, there is rather good evidence that it does. As Lasnik and Saito showed (reanalyzing data from Postal) case dependency affects the domain of a nominal’s scope.[7]The dependency between case and scope is one of the deeper discoveries of MP in my opinion, though I will not pursue that claim here.[8]

That’s the sum of what is relevant about CCT for this post. There are well-known problems (wagerverbs being the most conspicuous (see the discussion section of the earlier post for elucidation)) but IMO the main virtue of CCT is that it combines quite smoothly with a Merge based conception of FL/UG. I will say something about this at the end, but first it’s time to look at the DCT.

First off, the DCT is actually not that new. A version was mooted by the Brandeis Bunch of Yip, Mailing and Jackendoff in the mid 1980s.[9]However, it didn’t catch on much until Alec Marantz revived a version in 1991. Since then, I would wager that the DCT has become the “standard” approach to morphological case, though, as we shall see, what it claims exactly, has been (at least to me) elusive.

Here are some points that are fairly clear. 

First, it is exclusively a theory of overt case marking. It has no intention of accounting for nominal distributions. So, DCT is a theory of what CCT takes to be an add-on.[10]This is not in itself a problem for either account, but it is worth noting (yet again). 

So, DCT is a theory of the overtly witnessed case values (or at least it is so in Marantz and Bobaljik and most other advocates (though see Omer’s take below)). The standard version thus aims to explain the distribution of the overt morpho-phonologically case marking found on nominals (in many, though not all, languages). An important virtue is that it extends to bothnominative-accusative case marking and ergative-absolutive case marking systems. Consequently, investigations of DCT have enriched our appreciation of the complexity of case marking patterns cross linguistically.

A second key feature: the standard version of DCT (e.g. Marantz, Bobaljik) treats case marking as a non-syntactic process. More concretely, it is part of post syntactic processing. Omer and others have argued against this conception. But as originally mooted, DCT operations are outside the syntax.

Third, CCT’s core idea is that overt case marking is an inter-nominal dependency. Case marking reflects a relation between nominals within a specified domain. It is not primarily a head-nominal relation. So, for example, accusative is what one finds on DPs that have anothernon-case valued nominal higherup in the samedomain. Overt case, then, is a XP-YP relation (notan X⁰-YP relation) with the case value of the dependentnominal stemming from the presence of another non-dependentnon-valuednominal in the same domain. The advertising that generally accompanies DCT stresses that for DCT (in contrast to CCT) case is notabstract, but very concrete in that it concerns itself with theovertcase that we can hear/see on nominals, not some abstract feature that only sometimes overtly surfaces. The strongest version of this idea is that the purview of the DCT is the full panoply of morpho-phonologically realized cases. However, this is very clearly too strong. Let me explain.

First, like CCT, DCT agrees that there is an important distinction between inherent/lexical case that is semantically/thematically restricted and structural case that isn’t. Like CCT, it takes the former to be effectively a X⁰-YP dependency with X⁰being a theta role assigner. As lexical case is a by-product of theta assignment, this supposition, like the one made in CCT, is not unreasonable. The important point is that like CCT, DCT focuses on a subset of the cases overtly expressed. So, like CCT, the dependent part of the DCT is at besta theory of overt structuralcase.

A strong version of a DCT approach to structural case would have it that all dependent case values in a language are the product of a DP-DP relation holding within a circumscribed domain. So, for example, if accusative is the realization of dependent case in language L then modulo some quirky lexical case instanceswe would find accusative case on dependentDPs alone (nominative in L being what we find on otherwise non-valued non-dependent cases). This would be a strong theory. Unfortunately, it looks to be false.

In particular, we know that there exists languages in which overt structural accusative case occurs on DPs in structures where the DP that carries it cannot bea dependent case. For example, the accusative we find in forinfinitives (For her to leave would be terrible) or the one we find in acc-ing gerunds (her kissing him would be terrible) or in languages like Latin which have acc-infinitive constructions. In all these examples, the overt case of the DP looks like the case we find on the object of transitive verbs, which is the canonical dependent case value. 

Moreover, these are clearly structural cases as they are in no way thematically restricted. And it is clear the accusative we find here is not dependent on any other DP in its domain (we can always find them, for example, on the sole argument of an unaccusative in these settings). So there exists a class of morpho-phonologically overt accusatives that are not overtly marked accusative in virtue of being dependent. What then marks them overtly accusative? Well, the obvious answer is some local head (foror the head of the gerund/infinitive). Thus, DCT must allow that there are two ways of assigning accusative values, only one of which reflects its “dependent” status. Or to put this less charitably, DCT presupposes that the core case marking relation identified by CCT also plays a role in accounting for overt structural case. What DCT denies, then, is that allaccusatives are marked by heads. Some are dependent cases, some are marked by heads. On this construal of the DCT, it appears that CCT is not so much wrong as incomplete. 

Moreoever, it appears that within DCT case is no less abstract than it is in CCT as there is, at best, an indirect relationbetween a specific overt value (e.g. accusative) and being a dependent or a non dependent case.

Nor is this problem restricted to subjects, or so I have been reliably told. Here’s what I mean. I gave a paper at the German LSA this past spring and one of the perks of doing so was hearing Julie Legate give a paper on argument structure and passives. She provided scads of data that showed that in languages that systematically violate Burzio’s generalization we can nonetheless find “objects” that bear accusative case. In other words, there exist many nom-acc languages where we find accusative case sitting on DPs in object positions in sentences where there is every reason to believe that there are no additional arguments (i.e. 1-place predicates where the internal argument is marked accusative). If this is right, then we cannot analyze the accusative as an instance of dependent case and must, instead, trace the witnessed value to some head that provides it (a CCTer would suggest v). 

So, neither subjects nor objects in general can be assumed to bear a dependent case valuein virtue of being a dependent case. The generalization seems to be not that DCT is a theory of overtmorpho-phonological structural case in general, but only of overt structural case that we find most typically in transitive constructions (ones where Burzio’s generalization holds). In other words, the purview of the theory seems, at least to me, much narrower and different than I thought it was from reading the general advertising.

Let me repeat an important point that Omer repeatedly made in class is that there is a good sense in which DCT is no less abstract than CCT. Why? Because, we cannot go from a witnessed case value to the conclusion that the DP that carries it is dependent. Rather we can only assume that if a DP is dependent it will carry the dependent case value though what that overtvalue is remains a free parameter (so far as I can tell).[11]

So, in effect, DCT is effectively a theory of abstract case defines a mapping between some DPs in multiple DP domains (the dependent ones) and some case values (e.g. acc in nom-acc Gs). At best, the theory explains what values one finds in transitive clauses (one with at least two nominals) modulo some specification of the relevant domains.[12]

This last point is worth emphasizing. For illustration consider a sentence like (1):

(1)  DP₁V [_IPDP₂Infinitive V DP₃]]

What case should we expect here? Well DP₃should get dependent case if DP₂is in its domain and DP₂is unvalued (at least at the point that DP₃’s value is determined). So, if this is a nom-acc language, we should expect to find DP₃bearing acc case. What of DP₂? This will depend on whether DP₁is in the same domain as DP₂. If it is, then if DP₁has no case value then DP₂will also bear acc case. In effect what we will have here is an instance of what we find in English ECMs. DP₁will surface with nominative case. 

However, what if DP₂is not in the same domain as DP₁? If it isn’t then it would get assigned nominative case. What we would to find is something that does not arise in English, the sentential analogue of He expects he to kiss her. So, to block this we need a story that forcesDP₂to be in the same domain as DP₁, maybe by forcing it to move. What forces this? So far as I know, nothing. We can, for example, stipulate that it is in the same domain or that it move (e.g. by putting some EPP feature on a functional (phase) head in the higher clause), but there is nothing that forces either conclusion. So this would have to be an extra feature. Recall that DCT is nota theory of DP distribution. There is no analogue of the case filter that forces movement. And even if there were, DP₂could be assigned nominative case if it did not move. So why must DP₂bear acc case? Because we are assuming it moves orbecause the domain of case assignment is the whole clause and case is assigned bottom up or….[13]All of these are free parameters in DCT. At any rate, there is nothing in the theory that in principle prohibits nominative case in ECM constructions. It all depends on how the relevant domains are constructed.[14]

There are other questions as well. For example, given that we can get the same surface forms either via a X⁰-DP relation or a XP-YP relation learnability issues will most likely arise. Whenever we can do things in various ways then in any given circumstance the child will have to choose, presumably based on PLD. SO there are potential learnability issues with this kind of mixed theory.

In addition, there are theoretical puzzles: why do the very same case values surface in these very different ways? Are there are languages that distinguish the class of morphological cases assigned by CCT mechanisms and those assigned by DCT mechanisms. If there aren’t, why not.[15]

None of these questions are unanswerable (I would assume), but it did surprise me that how much narrower the scope of the DCT was than I had supposed it to be before Omer walked us through the details. It is basically a theory of the distribution of overt case in transitive clauses. It is nota general theory of overt case morphology (as sometimes advertised), or at least the distinctive features are not. From where I sit, it’s a pretty modest part of UG even if correct and it leaves large chunks of CCT potentially intact

Given all of this, I would argue that the empirical advantages of the DCT had better be pretty evident if we are to add it to CCT. Here is what I mean. Given that it presupposes mechanisms and relations very like those found in CCT, then the argument that we need DCT ones in addition to those of CCTmust argue either that CCT cannothandle the data that DCT addresses or that DCT handles it in a far superior manner. The arguments I have seen fall into the second disjunct. It is actually quite hard to argue that noversion of CCT could accommodate the data (after all, there is always a possible (ad hoc) head around to do the CCT dirty work). So, the argument must be that even though CCTcando it, it does not do it nicely or elegantly. But given that adding the DCT to the required mechanics of CCT creates a theoretically more redundant account, then the superiority of DTC accounts had better be overwhelming to pay the cost of such theoretical enrichment. 

As a personal matter, I have not been convinced that the cost is worth it, but others will no doubt differ in their judgments. What seems to me, however, is that given that DCT requires something like CCT to getsomeof the case values right, even a cumbersome CCT account might not be theoretically worse off than a DCT account that incorporates a CCT component.

That said, none of this is why I favor the CCT accounts. The main reason is that I understand how a CCT could be incorporated into a minimalist Merge based account of FL/UG.  Here’s what I mean.

There is a version of MP that I am very fond of. It adopts the following Fundamental Principle of Grammar (FPG):

FPG: For expressions A and B to grammatically interact, A and B must merge

In other words, the only way for expressions to grammatically interact is via Merge. They locally interact under E-merge and non-locally under I-merge (which, as you all know, is one and the same operation). Thus, e.g. selection or subcategorization or theta marking is under E-merge and antecedence or control or movement is under I-merge. I like the FPG. It’s simple. It even strikes me as natural as it enshrines the importance of constituency at its very core.

What’s important here is that it easily accommodates the CCT. A head A case marks a nominal B only if A and B Merge. In MP accounts, this would be I-merge. 

In contrast, I don’t see how to make DCT fit with this picture. The inter-nominal dependency that marks the most fundamental relation is not plausibly a chain relation formed under I-merge.  So, it is not a possible legit relation at all if we buy into something like the FPG. As I have so purchased, the DCT would induce in me a strong sense of caveat emptor.

I know, I know; one thoerists’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens. But ifyou like the FPG (which I do) then you won’t like replacing CCT with DCT (which I don’t).

Ok, enough. There are many reasons to get off this long post at many points. The real intent here has been to provoke DCTers (Omer!) to specify what they take the theory to be about and whether they agree that it is quite abstract and that it requires something like CCT as a sub-part. And if this is so, why we should be happy about it. So, I hope this provoked, and thx for the course Omer. It was terrifically enlightening.

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[1]I’ve reviewed CCT before (here) so some of this will be redundant. That’s the nice thing about blog posts. They can be. We would neversee anything similar in a refereed article where all contents are novel and nobody ever chews their food twice.

[2]Actually what goes into the “etc” is not set. Is dative structural? It can be. Genitive? Can be, but need not be. The clean ones in nom-acc languages are nominative and accusative, though even these can come from another source as we shall presently note.

[3]This does not require assuming that FL have but one morpho-phono realization scheme. There is room for an erg-abs as well as a nom-acc schema. But as these matters are way beyond my competence, I leave them with this briefest mention.

[4]I frankly have never fully grasped the distinction (if there is one) between inherent and lexical case. However, what is critical here is that it is semantically restricted, being the overt manifestation of a semantic role/value. This is decidedly notwhat we see with structural case, which seems in no way restricted thematically (or semantically for that matter).

[5]FWIW, IMO, structural case (both abstract and overt) is the really weird one. Were all cases lexical there would be nothing odd about them. They would just be the outward form of a semantic dependency. But this is precisely what structural case is not. And so why nominals bear or need them is quite unclear. At least it is to me. In fact, I would call it one of the great MP conundra: why case?

[6]This consequence is obvious if one assumes that case is discharged under I-merge. It is less obvious if it case is discharged via Agree. The original Lasnik and Saito analysis assumed the former.

[7]We find similar data in many other languages (e.g. Japanese) where we can predict a DP’s scope properties from the case values it bears. 

[8]Interestingly, this data has been largely ignored by many mainstream minimalists for it remains inexplicable in theories where features “lower” fromv to V and case is executed via Agree rather than I-merge.

[9]At the time, they were all Brandeis faculty.

[10]And as such, DCT should be in principle compatible with CCT. However, though this should be possible, my impression is that devotees of the DCT have been disinclined to treat the two in this way. I do not know why.

[11]It is not even clear to me that one can conclude that alldependent cases will realize a single value. This does not follow from the theory so far as I can tell.

[12]Of course, not all clauses with two nominal include a subject, but thee are niceties that I don’t want to get into here.

[13]Note, if we could treat the relevant domain as the whole clause, then there would be no need for DP₂to move at all and the correlation between scope and case that Lasnik and Saito discussed would theoretically evaporate. 

[14]Note that the acc feature in ECM in CCT is a product of the particular head we have. The analogue of this stipulation in DCT is the size of the relevant domain. One might try to get around this theoretical clunkiness by assuming the relevant domains are phases (though deciding what is and isn’t a phase is no small theoretical feat nowadays either). But what matters is that the embedded clause is not phase like in (1). Were it such, the problem would reappear. By breaking the link between a theory of the distribution of DPs and their values, DCT has little to say about such cases except that something else must determine when the two subjects are in the same local domain relevant for determining dependent case.

[15]E.g. There are lexical cases (e.g. instrumental, comitative, ablative) that seem to be exclusively lexical. Are there any dependent cases that are exclusively dependent?

            Note that this is theoretically similar to an observation standardly made wrt resumptive pronouns. Why do they always assume the shape of “regular” bound pronouns? One answer is that they arebound pronouns, i.e. that there is no separate class of resumptivesprecisely because if there were we might expect them to have a distinctive morphology somewhere. The absence of a distinction argues for an absence of the category. Similar logic applies in the domain of dependent case vs head assigned case.