Abstract for Phoevos Panagiotidis's talk

The internal structure of mixed projections
Phoevos Panagiotidis (University of Cyprus)
April 29, 2008 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

Grammatical categories such as nouns and verbs have recently been recaptured and reinterpreted as the combination of categorisers, a nominaliser (n), a verbaliser (v) and an adjectiviser (a), whose syntactic projections constitute “word-internal” phases, with bare, category-less roots: Halle & Marantz (1993), Marantz (1997; 2000; 2006a), Harley & Noyer (1998), Embick (2000), Arad (2003; 2007); Embick & Marantz (2006). Broadly following Baker (2003), let’s suppose that there is a distinctive feature [N] on n – the nominaliser – and a feature [V] on v – the verbaliser. So, ‘nouns’ (i.e. nPs) and ‘verbs’ (i.e. vPs) are distinguished between them by the ‘categorial’ feature, [N] or [V], on the categoriser.

Now, if we do not want features [N] and [V] to come prepackaged from the lexicon with the roots they co-occur with, then we probably also shun categorial features for functional categories such as [T], [C] or Chomsky’s (1995) [D]. In the spirit of Ouhalla (1991), Grimshaw (1991) and van Riemsdijk’s (1998) Categorial Identity Thesis, we can argue that functional heads must bear the uninterpretable version of the categoriser’s [N] or [V] feature. Panagiotidis (2002) calls this hypothesis Categorial Deficiency of functional heads. If this is on the right track, then we can explain why there are no projections without a categoriser: all the uninterpretable [uN] and [uV] features on functional heads would remain unchecked. Moreover, we can reduce the matching relation between functional and lexical elements (e.g. T with V but not N) to a categorial Agree operation.

Mixed projections – such as English POSS–ing gerunds, nominalised infinitives, syntactic nominalisations and many others – combine properties from two different categories, e.g. verbal / clausal and nominal. They have been the theme of extensive research since the early days of generative grammar, with a number of proposals striving to explain why they exist and what their head is (see Hudson 2003 for an overview). I wish to show that taking UG to sanction both interpretable and uninterpretable versions of the ‘categorial’ features [N] and [V] – as with any other feature – provides us with a way to capture both the existence and internal make-up of mixed projections.

The starting point will have to be Bresnan’s (1997: 4) empirical observation that a mixed projection “can be partitioned into two categorially uniform subtrees such that one is embedded as a constituent of the other”. In other words, nominal and verbal chunks in a mixed projection are distinct and occupy different ‘sides’ thereof – they never intersperse: there must be a cut-off point where verbal characteristics end and nominal ones begin. Developing an analysis in Reuland (1983), Johnson (1988), Hazout (1994), van Hout & Roeper (1998), Ackema & Neeleman (2004: 172-181) and elsewhere, I will argue that the two categorially uniform chunks in a mixed projection are linked together by a special head, the SWITCH. This acts as the ‘glue’ keeping the verbal / clausal and the nominal subtree together.

SWITCHes are ordinary categorisers (i.e. v and n), but with a twist: they also bear uninterpretable categorial features. For instance, the SWITCH mediating between the higher nominal and the lower verbal / clausal part of a POSS–ing gerund is an n (thus bearing [N]) also containing an uninterpretable [uV] feature. Hence it can be part of a verbal / clausal extended projection – by virtue of bearing [uV], like Tense or Aspect – but it is also a ‘noun’, hence capable of appearing in the complement of nominal categories like D.

If SWITCH heads are like categorisers, then we expect that they would only appear in particular positions. After all, categorisers have been argued to project the lowest phases in a derivation (Marantz 2006a; 2006b). I will discuss evidence from Dutch, Spanish and Greek that indeed SWITCHes can only merge at the edges of phases and/or Prolific Domains (Grohmann 2003; Panagiotidis & Grohmann, 2008).