2012/07/01 by Jonathan David Bobaljik, Susi Wurmbrand · 3 citations
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
paper · doi:10.1162/ling_a_00094
crossref issued 2012/07/01 · crossref published 2012/07/01 · crossref published-print 2012/07/01 · openalex publication_date 2012/07/01 · crossref created 2012/08/20 · crossref deposited 2021/03/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/29 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
A recurring pattern of partial correlations between word order variation and scope possibilities (the ¾ signature) supports a particular view of economy constraints in syntax, with these properties: (1) There are economy conditions (soft constraints) that value a particular type of correspondence between LF and PF representations. (2) These constraints are unidirectional: LF (broadly construed) is calculated first and determines PF (surface word order). (3) Scope rigidity is a property not of languages but of specific configurations, and the distribution of rigidity effects is (largely) predictable from independent variation in the syntactic resources of various languages. We focus here on the interaction of these three assumptions and on the role of (2) in predicting the ¾ signature effect. We contrast our proposal with Reinhart’s (2005) Interface Economy model, in which economy conditions regulate a mapping that takes overt structure as its input and yields permissible interpretations.