Speaker: Richard Kayne (NYU)
Title: The Silence of Projecting Heads
Date/Time: Friday, Apr 25, 3:30-5p
Location: 32-141
Examination of sentence-final particles, complementizers, up/down-type particles, modal
elements like ‘need’, the nominal character of agreement morphemes, aspect, tense, adjectives
and adverbs, determiners, adpositions, focus and topic, derivational suffixes and light verbs
leads to the conclusion that a preponderance of projecting syntactic heads are silent.I suggest that we understand this to reflect the simpler fact that all syntactically projecting
heads are silent. That simpler fact derives in turn from the fact that, for reasons having to do
with the systematic antisymmetry-based association of Merge with temporal order,
phonological material cannot be bundled together with a syntactic feature in a single node.If so, then temporal order must be part of core syntax, as is suggested in any case by
cross-linguistic asymmetries concerning backwards pronominalization that feed into
interpretation.The antisymmetry-based prohibition against feature-bundling simultaneouly has as a
consequence the decompositionality principle of Kayne (2005).