Phrasal Spellout and Partial Overwrite: On an alternative to backtracking

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Abstract

This paper explores branching vocabulary items as a possible alternative to backtracking in Nanosyntax. Such vocabulary items give rise to the possibility of partial overwrite. Initially, they spell out a node with two phrasal daughters. At a subsequent stage, the right branch is interpreted by a new element, but the original item continues to spell out the left branch of such a derivation. The effects that branching vocabulary items give rise to thus mimic aspects of backtracking, without requiring mechanisms that undo parts of the derivation.

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The Minimalist Program

Chomsky Noam, Chomsky, Chomsky, Noam … (1995)

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Exploring Nanosyntax

Lena Baunaz, Liliane Haegeman, Karen De Clercq … (2018)

By offering the first in-depth introduction to the framework of nanosyntax, Exploring Nanosyntax fills a major gap in the current theoretical literature. Originating within the generative Principles and Parameters tradition in the study of language, nanosyntax was developed starting in the early 2000s by Michal Starke. Deploying a radical implementation of the cartographic “one feature–one head” maxim, the framework aims at a fine-grained decomposition of morphosyntactic structure, thus laying bare the building blocks of the universal functional sequence. This volume aims at making three contributions. First, it presents the framework’s constitutive tools and principles and explains how nanosyntax relates to cartography and to Distributed Morphology. Second, the volume illustrates how nanosyntactic tools and principles can be applied within a range of empirical domains of natural language. In doing so, the volume provides a range of detailed and crosslinguistic investigations that uncover novel empirical data and that contribute to a better understanding of the functional sequence. Finally, new theoretical strands internal to the nanosyntactic framework are explored, with specific problems raised and discussed. The volume contains original contributions by senior and junior researchers in the field and constitutes an ideal handbook for advanced students and researchers in linguistics. Above all, Exploring Nanosyntax offers the first encompassing view of this promising framework, making its methodology and exciting results accessible to a wide audience.