講者：Nigel Duffield (Konan University, Japan)
題目：Right where it belongs? On Multifunctionality, Projection and (covert) Movement in Vietnamese
日期：2017年3月8日 (星期三)
時間：中午12時30分開始
地點：人社院會議室B305
摘要：
Since its inception, syntactic research has been informed by a theoretical tension between the demands of explanatory vs. descriptive adequacy—the need to strike the right balance between a maximally general theory of the ‘initial state of the language faculty’ and an empirically responsible description of language-particular facts. Whereas the Principles & Parameters model (Chomsky 1981, 1985, Chomsky & Lasnik 1993) allowed for an internal theoretical resolution of this tension, albeit with some creative fudges (see, e.g., Jaeggli & Safir 1986), current Minimalism forces us to make more explicit and austere choices, which typically favour a significant redistribution of labour: what previously could be handled by (parametric) syntactic rules must now be pushed back to the lexicon, pushed out to the interfaces, or handed over entirely (‘third factor explanation’, Chomsky 2005; cf. O’Grady 2012).

While the Minimalist impulse is obviously a positive development for some, to others its desirability is much less self-evident: theoretical gains do not appear to outweigh the significant empirical losses. In this talk, I will re-examine a number of recent attempts to explain some language-particular facts in Vietnamese grammar—in addition to my own research (Duffield 1999, 2005, 2007, 2013, 2014), the focus will be on work by Trinh (2006, 2010), Phan (2013) and Bruening & Tran (2006)—and consider what light such analyses shed on broader theoretical issues. It will be argued that with respect to phrase-structure, Vietnamese facts favour an enriched, rather than an impoverished, interpretation of core syntax; conversely, with respect to (covert) movement, the data suggests that apparent variation is likely due to processing effects (Sag et al. 2008).

Central to the present discussion is the notion that syntax is a direct projection of lexical properties, a notion enshrined in the Projection Principle (Chomsky 1981). As Huang (1997) expresses it:

‘A central assumption in generative grammar research on the relationship between syntax and the lexicon is that syntax is a projection of the lexicon. The structure of sentences is a reflection of the lexical properties of the individual lexical items they contain.’
Huang (1997:45)

In subsequent Minimalist approaches (e.g. Chomsky 1993, 1995, 2000), the Projection Principle is is tightened up further through the requirement that syntactic computations operate exclusively with the lexical items introduced in the initial array (numeration), without reference to any node labels or other extraneous symbols (e.g., theta-roles, indices, movement traces, levels of representation) that might contribute to sentence meaning. Whatever the theoretical advantages of this approach for delivering an extremely spare Minimalist syntax, it should be clear that this massively increases lexical complexity, leading to a multiplicity of different abstract features attaching to what are, intuitively speaking, the same lexical items.
But what if it ain’t so? What if we have fundamentally misconstrued the syntax-lexicon relationship? Here, I’ll consider an antithetical alternative: that the lexicon—or at least, a theoretically interesting subpart of it—is better viewed as a projection of syntactic meaning. Anti-Projection. Words as filters, exponents of syntactic configurations, acquiring their meaning in virtue of their syntactic position. Lexical, rather than syntactic, Minimalism: cf. Marantz (2005), Borer (2007). I will argue that this reversal offers more than a novel perspective on the syntax of familiar inflectional languages: it is the only reasonable and empirically adequate way to treat multi-functional morphemes in isolating languages like Vietnamese.
In contrast to inflectional languages, Vietnamese does not differentiate subtle grammatical contrasts in the lexicon. Instead, it disposes of a set of radically-underspecified 'multifunctional' items, whose semantics are determined in part—and in some instances exhaustively—by their position in phrase-structure. A clear example of this multifunctionality is offered by the modal
auxiliary được (also phải, nên), which is variously interpreted as a deontic, epistemic or abilitative modal—even as a non-modal (realis), aspectual, particle—depending on its structural position. This is illustrated in (0); see Duffield (1999), Phan & Duffield (in prep.)

0. a. Ông Quang được mua cái nhà.
prn Q. can buy cl house
‘Quang was allowed to buy a house.’
b. Ông Quang mua được cái nhà.
prn Q. buy can cl house
‘Quang bought a house.’
c. Ông Quang mua cái nhà được.
prn Q. buy cl house can
‘Quang is able to buy a house/Quang may possibly buy a house.’

Through an examination of these and other functional morphemes in Vietnamese, with particular focus on two particles—không/thế—on the right edge of interrogatives, I will try to make a case for Anti-Projection/Lexical Minimalism, and consider its corollaries for the other larger questions mentioned above, including the physical boundaries of syntax—whether uttered elements can be ‘extra-syntactic’. Finally, I will speculate on whether such a fundamental principle might itself serve as a locus of grammatical parameterization.