TY - JOUR
T1 - A Head Movement Approach to Talmy's Typology
AU - Raffaella, Folli
AU - Harley, Heidi
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2020/7/15
Y1 - 2020/7/15
N2 - We propose that the well-known verb-framed/satellite-framed variation observed by Talmy (1975, 1985, 2000) is a true syntactic parameter of a well-understood type: A head movement parameter. We claim that it depends on an uninterpretable feature bundled with the particular v head used in change-of-state constructions that forces the head of the Res(ult)P complement of v to undergo head movement to v in Italian. The technical apparatus employed is a feature-driven head movement parameter, of the same kind that accounts for the familiar V-to-T or T-to-C movement variation crosslinguistically. We argue that in Talmy’s class of verb-framed languages, head movement of the embedded Res head to change-of-state v is mandatory, just as head movement of v to finite T is mandatory in V-to-T movement languages. Unlike previous proposals, this approach does not ascribe a deficiency to verb-framed languages, either in their semantic composition inventory or in their inventory of structural operations, both deficiencie being prima facie implausible from a biolinguistic/Minimalist perspective.
AB - We propose that the well-known verb-framed/satellite-framed variation observed by Talmy (1975, 1985, 2000) is a true syntactic parameter of a well-understood type: A head movement parameter. We claim that it depends on an uninterpretable feature bundled with the particular v head used in change-of-state constructions that forces the head of the Res(ult)P complement of v to undergo head movement to v in Italian. The technical apparatus employed is a feature-driven head movement parameter, of the same kind that accounts for the familiar V-to-T or T-to-C movement variation crosslinguistically. We argue that in Talmy’s class of verb-framed languages, head movement of the embedded Res head to change-of-state v is mandatory, just as head movement of v to finite T is mandatory in V-to-T movement languages. Unlike previous proposals, this approach does not ascribe a deficiency to verb-framed languages, either in their semantic composition inventory or in their inventory of structural operations, both deficiencie being prima facie implausible from a biolinguistic/Minimalist perspective.
KW - Head movement parameter
KW - Manner of directed motion
KW - Path
KW - Satellite-framed language
KW - Telic-pair formation
KW - Typology
KW - Verb-framed language
UR - https://pure.ulster.ac.uk/en/publications/a-head-movement-approach-to-talmys-typology
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85089121130&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00351
DO - https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00351
M3 - Article
VL - 51
SP - 425
EP - 470
JO - Linguistic Inquiry
JF - Linguistic Inquiry
SN - 0024-3892
IS - 3
ER -