The Derivation of VO and OV takes a new look at the relationship between head-final or OV structures and head-initial or VO ones, in light of recent work by Richard Kayne and others. The various papers in the volume take different positions with respect to whether one type of structure is derived from the other, and if so, which of the two orders is primary. Different options explored include derivation of VO order by head movement from a basic OV structure, derivation of VO by fronting of a phrasal VP remnant containing only the verb, derivation of OV by fronting of a remnant VP which the verb has vacated, and others. Each paper is thoroughly rooted in empirical observations about specific constructions drawn either from the Germanic languages or from others including Finnish, Hungarian, Japanese, and Malagasy. The volume consists of eleven original papers by Sjef Barbiers, Michael Brody, Naoki Fukui & Yuji Takano, Liliane Haegeman, Hubert Haider, Roland Hinterhölzl, Anders Holmberg, Thorbjorg Hróarsdóttir, Matthew Pearson, Peter Svenonius, and Knut Tarald Taraldsen, plus an introduction by the editor.

This monograph is intended as a contribution to the field of bilingualism from a generative syntax perspective at a variety of levels. It investigates code-switching between Korean and English and also between Japanese and English, which exhibit several interesting features. Due to their canonical word order differences, Korean and Japanese being SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) and English SVO (Subject-Verb-Object), a code-switched sentence between Korean/Japanese and English can take, in principle, either OV or VO order, to which little attention has been paid in the literature. On the contrary, word order is one of the most extensively discussed topics in generative syntax, especially in the Principles and Parameter’s approach (P&P) where various proposals have been made to account of various order patterns of different languages. By taking the generative view that linguistic variation is due to variation in the domain of functional categories rather than lexical roots (e.g. Borer 1984; Chomsky 1995), this monograph investigates word order variation in Korean-English and Japanese-English code-switching, with particular attention to the relative placement of the predicate (verb) and its complement (object) in two contrasting word orders, OV and VO, which was tested against Korean-English and Japanese-English bilingual speakers’ introspective judgments. The results provide strong evidence indicating that the distinction between functional and lexical verbs plays a major role in deriving different word orders (OV and VO, respectively) in Korean-English and Japanese-English code-switching, which supports the hypothesis that parametric variation is attributed to differences in the features of a functional category in the lexicon, as assumed in minimalist syntax. In particular, the explanation pursued in this monograph is based on feature inheritance, a syntactic derivational process, which was proposed in recent developments the Minimalist Program. The monograph shows that by studying diverse and creative word order patterns of code-switching, we are at a better disposal to understand how languages are parameterized similarly or differently in a given domain, which is the very topic that generative linguists have pursued for a long time.

This monograph answers the question of why English changed from an OV to a VO language on the assumption that this change is due to intensive language contact with Scandinavian. It shows for the first time that the English language was much more heavily influenced by Scandinavian than assumed before, i.e., northern Early Middle English texts clearly show Scandinavian syntactic patterns like stylistic fronting that can only be found today in the Modern Scandinavian languages. Thus, it sheds new light on the force of language contact in that it shows that a language can be heavily influenced through contact with another language in such a way that it affects deeper levels of language. It further gives an introduction to working with the Penn-Helsinki-Parsed Corpus of Middle English II (PPCMEII). It discusses the texts included in the corpus, it describes the format of the texts, and it explains how to search the corpus with the tool called Corpus Search. The book targets researchers in diachronic syntax, comparative syntax and in general linguists working in the field of generative syntax. It can further be used as an introduction to working with the PPCMEII.

This study shows that Scandinavian object shift and so-called A-scrambling in the continental Germanic languages are the same, and aims at providing an account of the variation that we find with respect to this phenomenon by combining certain aspects of the Minimalist Program and Optimality Theory. More specifically, it is claimed that representations created by a simplified version of the computational system of human language CHL are evaluated in an optimality theoretic fashion by taking recourse to a very small set of output constraints.

This volume comprises twenty eight papers on Dravidian by K.A. Jayaseelan and R. Amritavalli. These papers cover the entire area of Dravidian syntax, and they are simultaneously wide-ranging and targeted in their analyses. No future discussion of Dravidian languages is possible without taking into account the analyses set forth in these pages.

This monograph proposes a minimalist, phase-based approach to the derivation of coordinate structures, utilizing the operations Copy and Match to account for both the symmetries and asymmetries of coordination. Data are drawn primarily from English, German and Dutch. The basic assumptions are that all coordinate structures are symmetric to some degree (in contrast to parasitic gap and many verb phrase ellipsis constructions), and these symmetries, especially with ellipsis, allow syntactic derivations to utilize Copy and Match in interface with active memory for economizing with gaps and assuring clarity of interpretation. With derivations operating at the feature level, troublesome properties of coordinate structures such as cross-categorial and non-constituent coordination, violations of the Coordinate Structure Constraint, as well as coordinate ellipsis (Gapping, RNR, Left-Edge Ellipsis) are accounted for without separate mechanisms or conditions applicable only to coordinate structures. The proposal provides support for central assumptions about the structure of West Germanic.

The papers in this volume can be grouped into two broad, overlapping classes: those dealing primarily with case and those dealing primarily with grammatical relations. With regard to case, topics include descriptions of the case systems of two Caucasian languages, the problems of determining how many cases Russian has and whether Hungarian has a case system at all, the issue of case-combining, the retention of the dative in Swedish dialects, and genitive objects in the languages of Europe. With regard to grammatical relations, topics include the order of obliques in OV and VO languages, the effects of the referential hierarchy on the distribution of grammatical relations, the problem of whether the passive requires a subject category, the relation between subjecthood and definiteness, and the issue of how the loss of case and aspectual systems triggers the use of compensatory mechanisms in heritage Russian.