The syntax of functional left peripheries and its relation to information structure

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Julia Bacskai-Atkari
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2015 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 262814098

The project aims at investigating the structure of functional left peripheries and at providing a syntactic model for how the appearance of multiple projections interacts with economy principles and with the need for marking syntactic information overtly. Functional left peripheries may appear either at the leftmost edge of the clause (the CP-domain) or clause-internally (the functional vP-domain) and they are responsible for marking the type of the clause and, if applicable, that the clause is subordinate. The distribution of functional left peripheries shows cross-linguistic variation that is related to the information structural properties and prosodic patterns of a language.Set in a generative framework and concentrating mainly on West-Germanic languages and Hungarian, the project has three major goals. First, it aims at investigating why certain languages (e.g. Hungarian) have fully-fledged functional vP layers that may contain clause-type markers (e.g. for interrogatives in Hungarian), while in other languages (e.g. English) all clausal markers are located at the CP-domain. Both functional layers may contain iterated projections, which varies according to constructions and languages/dialects, and follows from the need for marking syntactic information overtly. Second, these functional layers may host lexical elements that move there because of certain information structural properties (e.g. focus). Languages that seem to have a designated clause-medial position for these elements (e.g. Hungarian) tend to have a sentence-medial functional left periphery, while others (e.g. English) do not; the project examines the question whether this correlation holds. Third, the project investigates how clausal ellipsis is governed by these functional elements and how the relative order of the heads and their complements defines whether ellipsis is possible or not.Since the project has a strong theoretical orientation, the main focus will be on a reconsideration of how well-known pattern should be analysed. In addition, the project will include experiments eliciting grammaticality judgements. Finally, the study of diachronic data will involve the use of annotated corpora.The importance of the project lies in providing an alternative to cartographic approaches, which treat functional left peripheries as rigid constructs and which consider information structural notions to be directly related to syntactic features. The reasons for why certain languages and constructions apply multiple projections while others do not will be linked to other, more general properties and in this way the structure of functional left peripheries may be reduced to a minimum rather than postulating a large number of empty projections.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants