2011/07/01 by Sam Steddy, Vieri Samek-Lodovici
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · #Linguistics and Discourse Analysis #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
paper · pdf · doi:10.1162/ling_a_00053
crossref issued 2011/07/01 · crossref published 2011/07/01 · crossref published-print 2011/07/01 · openalex publication_date 2011/07/01 · crossref created 2011/07/06 · crossref deposited 2021/03/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/29 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
We propose an analysis that derives Cinque's (2005) typology of linear orders involving a demonstrative, numeral, adjective, and noun through four Optimality Theory constraints requiring leftward alignment of these items. We show that remnant movement is ungrammatical whenever it produces universally suboptimal alignments, compared with remnant-movement-free structures. Any movement is permitted, but only the best alignment configurations surface as grammatical. We also show that Cinque's original analysis must encode the structural derivations of all attested orders as parametric values of the associated languages. Our analysis need not make similar structural stipulations, as the different attested structures emerge from constraint reranking.