More on subjacency

Peter Svenonius (once again) asks the right question and Omer (once again) has interesting things to say about it (see here). Take a look. Here is my take on the issues. Please chime in with yours.

I agree with Omer that there may not be much of a consensus right now about how to deal with successive cyclicity in detail. However, so far as I can tell, there is general agreement that it has something to do with the PIC (this is the current analogue of the subacency principle, Bounding nodes and  the domains they create). 

As you know, there are two extant versions of the PIC, the more favored one being the one wherein a complement of a phase head is rendered inaccessible at the NEXT phase (usually when the next phase head is accessed). This comes close to coding the old idea of subjacent domain (as was early observed one has access to the domain one is in and the next one (i.e. no counting)). The strong version of a phase is less in favor, but it has some charms for it would force something like a "no edge skipping" requirement on the grammar (e.g. the old Rizzi idea that one could "skip" the most immediate Comp would be ruled out). There are purported arguments against this stronger version, but they never struck me as dispositive (and there are Legate style arguments against it). At any rate, there is consensus that phases should derive cyclicity.

How closely is this tied to features, uninterpretable or otherwise? Logically speaking, not that closely so far as I can tell. The issue of features is tied to whether movement is optional or obligatory. If Greed drives movement or uninterpretability then C features might be needed. Yes if Greed is strong and no if something like uninterpretability suffices to drive one to the phase edge as a last resort (Phase balance or Boskovic's take on the same idea). There is some evidence that intermediate Cs can have features, as we know. The generalization to all languages is a standard GG move. So, the idea is not empirically nuts. Of course, WHY this should be true is unclear in the absence of something like Greed, but then maybe this is an argument for a strong version of Greed.

This goes against the current fashion. It seems that nowadays movement is free again (free at last, free at last, thank the lord, free at last!). But then there is no requirement that there be intermediate features to drive movement, nor that there be uninterpretable features on WH to force it to move. The WH moves or it does not. If it does, then it must move to the intermediate C for PIC reasons. If it doesn't then no convergence. More specifically, what one needs are language specific requirements that force a given G to have a WH up top overtly in some languages (something like the old strong feature) or some kind of Rizzi Criterion that is fulfilled in G variable ways. This seems generally assumed in current technology, so no biggie here.

There is one last idea that has been tied to successive cyclicity: Chomsky's current idea about labels. Oddly, for Chomsky, the fact that there are languages where there appears to be agreement in non WH Cs with a moving WH is a big problem. Agreement should obviate further movement. Of course one can get fancier here with different features having different effects on labeling (and so movement), but this begins to hand code in the property we want explained (not a good thing to do).

That's the way things look from where I sit. So, there are several ways of getting edge to edge movement all involving the PIC in some fashion and thereby recoding the old subjacency criterion. I want to emphasize this: this is not a new explanation but a recoding of the old one (not that this is a bad thing).

Two last points: what is less clear to me is how this all hooks up with islands. Chomsky, it seems to me, is reluctant to take islands as G-real phenomena. He seems inclined to take the view he once criticized, viz: that islands are performance residues of complexity. I am skeptical myself, but it is a logical possibility. The Sprouse stuff has convinced me that it is likely false. 

This leaves the question of how to code Islands in phases? That's easy (as anyone who has tried will attest). The problem is that the coding follows from nothing (why are D edges different from C edges? why weak PIC rather than stropping? Why transfer when next pause head chosen rather than next phase completed? Why C and D and v as phases? Why week vs strong phases?). In fact, the coding just recapitulates the machinery in classical Subjacency theory. Or, Minimalism has not given us any insight into the details of subjacency as of this date. So, islands stand as having no good deep explanation beyond the one that Chomsky already provided for Subjacency that I quoted in the body of the earlier post.

Second: we really would love to tie island effects with ECP effects as Barriers and Cinque-Rizzi tried to do. Why? Because the domains for bounding and ECP are so damn similar. It would be really odd (IMO too odd to be tolerable) were these driven by different mechanisms given that their domains are virtually identical. So, we need to find a way of finally addressing ECP questions within MP. In particular we need to find a way of unifying them in ways more conceptually acceptable than the Barriers/Lasnik-Saito theory did.

So island effects are currently no better understood within minimalist theory than they were within GB. The GB story can be smoothly translated into technologically acceptable minimalist terms, but doing so provides no insight. Moreover, some parts of the old theory, the ECP part dealing with adjuncts vs arguments and their differing locality conditions, really has not good minimalist counterparts (does anyone really thing gamma marking is part of FL/UG?). That's how I see things. You? 

Dreams of a unified theory; a great big juicy problem (Yay!!)

The intricacies of A’-syntax is one of the glories of GB.[1]  The unification of Ross’s islands in terms of subjacency and the discovery of ECP dependencies (especially the adjunct/argument distinction) coupled with wide ranging investigations of these effects in a large variety of different kinds of languages marked a high point in Generative Grammar. This all changed with the Minimalist (M) “Revolution” (yes; these are scare quotes). Thereafter, Island and ECP effects mostly fell from the hot topics list (compare post M work with that done in the 80s and early 90s where it seemed that every other paper/book was about A’-dependencies and their island/ECP restrictions). Moreover, though early M was chock full of discussions of Superiority, an A’-effect, it was mainly theoretically interesting for the light that it threw on Minimality and Shortest Move/Attract rather than how it bore on Islands or the ECP. Indeed, from where I sit, the bulk of the interesting work within M has been on A rather than A’ dependencies.[2]

Moreover, whereas there has been interesting research aiming to unify various grammatical modules, subjacency and ECP have resisted theoretical integration, at least interesting versions thereof. It is possible, indeed easy, to translate bounding theory or barriers into phase terminology.[3] However, there is nothing particularly insightful gained in doing this. It is also possible to unify Islands with Minimality given the right use of features placed in appropriate edge positions, but IMO little has been gained to date in so proceeding. So Island and ECP effects, once the pride of theoretical syntax have become a backwater and a slightly embarrassing one for three related reasons.

First, though it is pretty easy to translate Subjacency (viz. bounding theory) in phase terms, this translation simply duplicates the peccadillos of the earlier approaches (e.g. we stipulated bounding nodes, we now stipulate (strong) phases, we stipulated escape hatches (C yes, D no) we now stipulate phase edges (both which phases have any to use and how many they have)).

Second, ad hoc as this is, it’s good compared to the problems the ECP throws up. For example, the ECP is conceptually a trace licensing requirement. Where does this leave us when we replace traces with copies as M does? Do copies need licensing? Why if they are simply different occurrences of a single expression? Moreover, how do we code the difference between adjuncts versus arguments?  What makes the former so restricted when compared to the latter?

Last, the obvious redundancy between Subjacency and the ECP raises serious M questions. Both involve the same island like configurations yet they are entirely different licensing conditions. Talk of redundancy! One of Subjacency or the ECP is bad enough, but both? Argh!!

So, A’-syntax raises M issues and a natural hope is to dispose of these problems by placing them in someone else’s trash bin. And there have been several attempts, to do just this, e.g. Kluender & Kutas, Sag & Hoffmeister, Hawkins, among others. The idea has been to treat island effects as a reflection of processing complexity, the latter arising when parsers try to relate elements outside an island (fillers) to positions (gaps) within an island.  It is well known that filler/gap dependencies impose a memory/storage cost as the process of relating a filler to a gap requires keeping the filler “live” until it’s discharged in the appropriate position. Interestingly, there is independent psycho-ling evidence that the cost of keeping elements active can depend on the details of the parse quite independently of whether islands are involved (e.g. beginnings of finite clauses induce load, as does the parsing of definites).[4] Island effects, on this view, are just the sum total of these island-independent processing costs. In effect, Islands are just structures where these other costly independently manifested requirements converge. If true, this idea could, with some work, let M off the island hook.[5] Wouldn’t that be nice?

It would be, but I personally doubt that this strategy will work out.  The main problem is that it seems very hard to explain the unacceptability profiles of island effects in processing terms. A recent volume (of which I am co-editor though Jon Sprouse did all the really heavy lifting and deserves all the credit, Experimental Syntax and Island Effects) reviews the basic issues. The main take home message is that when considered in detail, the relevant cited complexity inducers (e.g. definiteness) do not eliminate the structural contributions of islands to the perceived acceptability, though they can modulate it (viz. the super-additive effects of islands remain even if the severity of the unacceptability can be manipulated). Many of the papers in the volume address these issues in detail (see especially those by Jon Sprouse, Matt Wagers, and Colin Phillips). The book also contains good representatives of the processing “complexity” alternative and the interested reader is encouraged to take a look at the papers (WARNING: being a co-editor forbids me in good conscience, from advocating purchase but I believe that many would consider this book a perfect holiday gift even for those with no interest in the relevant intellectual issues, e.g. it’s really heavy and would make a perfect paperweight or door stopper).

A nice companion piece to the papers in the above volume that I have recently read seconds the conclusion that Island Effects have a structural source.  The paper (here) is by Yoshida, Kazanina, Pablos and Sturt (YKPS) and it explores the problem in a very clever way. Here’s a quick review.

YKPS starts from the assumption that if the problem is one of the processing complexities of islands, then any dependency into an island that is computed online (as filler/gap dependencies are) should show island like properties even if these dependencies are not products of movement. They identify forward cataphora (e.g. his₁ managers revealed that [_island the studio that notified Jeffrey Stewart₁ about the new film] selected a novel for the script) as one such dependency. YKPS shows that the indicated referential dependency is calculated online just as filler/gap dependencies are (both are very greedy in fixing the dependency). However, in contrast to movement dependencies, pronoun resolution in forward cataphora does not exhibit island effects. The argument is easy to follow and the conclusion strikes me as pretty solid, but read it and judge for yourself. What I liked about it is that it is a classic example of a typical linguistic argument form: YKPS identifies a dog that doesn’t bark. If parsing complexity is the relevant variable then it needs to explain both why some dependencies exhibit island effects and, just as importantly, why some do not. In other words, negative data counts! The absence of island effects is as much a datum as its presence is, though it is often ignored.[6] As YKPS put it:

Complexity accounts, which attribute island effects to the effect of processing complexity of the online dependency formation process, need to explain why the same complexity does not affect (my emphasis, NH) the formation of cataphoric dependencies. (17)

So, it seems to me that islands are here to stay, even if their presence in UG embarrasses minimalists.

Three points and I end. First, the argument that YKPS presents is another nice example of how psycho-techniques can be used to advance syntactic ends.  How so? Well, it is critical to YKPS’s point that forward cataphora involves the same kind of processing strategies (active filler) as do regular filler/gap dependencies that one finds in movement despite the dependencies being entirely different grammatically. This is what makes it possible to compare the two kinds of processes and conclude from their different behavior wrt islands that structural effects cannot be reduced to parsing complexity (a prima facie very reasonable hypothesis and one that might even be nice were it true!).[7] 

Second, the complexity theory of islands pertains to Subjacency Effects. The far harder problem, as I mentioned earlier, involve ECP effects. Indeed, were Subjacency Effects reduced to complexity effects, the presence of ECP effects in the very same configurations would become even more puzzling, at least to me. At any rate, both problems remain, and await a decent M analysis.

Third, let me end with some personal intellectual history. I taught a course on the old GB A’ material with Howard Lasnik this semester (a great experience, thx Howard) and have become pretty convinced that finding a way to simply recapitulate ECP and Island effects in M terms is by no means trivial.  To see this, I invite you to simply try to translate the GB theories into an M acceptable idiom. Even this is pretty hard to do, and a simple translation still leaves one short of a M acceptable account. Conclusion? This is still a really juicy research topic for the unificationally inclined, i.e. a great Minimalist research topic.

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[1] I take GB to be the logical culmination of work that first developed as the Extended Standard Theory. Moreover, I here, again, take GB to be one of several kissing cousins, such as GPSG, LFG, HPSG.

[2] This is a bird’s eye evaluation and there are notable exceptions to this coarse generalization. Here is one very conspicuous exception: how ellipsis obviates island effects. Lasnik and Merchant have turned this into a small very productive industry. The main theoretical effect has been to make us reconsider what makes an island islandy. The ellipsis effects have revived an interpretation that has some roots in Ross, that it is not the illicit dependency that matters but the phonological realization thereof that counts.  Islands, on this view, are PF rather than syntactic effects. At any rate, this is really interesting stuff which has led us to understand Island Effects in new ways.

[3] At least if one allows D to be a phase, something some (e.g. Chomsky) has only grudgingly accepted.

[4] Rick Lewis has some nice models of this based on empirical work by Gibson.

[5] Of course, more work needs doing. For example, one needs to explain, why, ellipsis obviates these processing effects (see note 2).

[6] Note 4 indicates another bit of negative data that needs explanation on the complexity account. One might think, for example, that having to infer structure would add to complexity and thus increase the unacceptability of island violations, contrary to what we in fact find.

[7] Very reasonable indeed as witnessed by Chomsky’s extensive efforts to argue against the supposition that island effects are simple complexity effects in On Wh Movement.