Preface
This post continues a theme started here and here. Broadly, this series of posts is an attempt to highlight the daylight that exists between syntax and semantics.
I have several motivations for writing these posts. First, writing them, and reading & replying to comments, really helps me sharpen my own thinking on the issues. (Whether I’m convincing anyone but myself is a separate matter, of course.) Additionally, though, it is my impression that when it comes to the syntax-semantics mapping, the working assumption that the mapping in question is transparent – a wholly legitimate research heuristic, of course – is in practice often elevated to the status of ontological principle. This, in turn, licenses potentially problematic inferences about syntax. And it is these cases that I wish to highlight.
I hasten to add that I’m not sure there’s anything different in kind here from what goes on in any other “interface” work. That is, I don’t mean to impugn syntax-semantics work in particular (as opposed to, say, syntax-morphology work or whatever else). It’s just that the particular syntax-semantics inferences I’m talking about are ones that I often bump up against in my own work, and I often get the feeling that they are accorded the status of “established truths” – which places the burden of proof on any proposal that would contradict them. It’s this view that I’d like to challenge here.
Finally, for interesting discussions pertaining to the substance of this post in particular, I’d like to thank Amy Rose Deal – who should not, of course, be held responsible for any of its contents; in fact I’m fairly sure she would disagree!
Okay, let’s get to it...
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What is an “A-position”? Originally, the ‘A’ was supposed to be a mnemonic for “Argument” – the idea being that an A-position is any position that could, in principle, introduce arguments. A particular set of properties was then shown to correlate with being in, or moving to, an A-position. Most important for our current purposes are the binding-related ones: A-positions were the positions from which one could antecede novel binding dependencies. Hence the well-known kind of asymmetry between (1a) and (1b):
