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Large-scale pied-piping in the labeling theory and conditions on weak heads

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Published/Copyright: January 19, 2024
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Abstract

This paper discusses the concept of weak head in Chomsky’s (2015. Problems of projection: Extensions. In Elisa Di Domenico, Cornelia Hamann & Simona Matteini (eds.), Structures, strategies and beyond: Studies in honour of Adriana Belletti, 3–16. Amsterdam: John Benjamins) sense from a typological perspective. This paper first establishes a novel generalization that large-scale pied-piping is available in a language only if the language has indeterminate pronouns in Kuroda’s (1965. Generative grammatical studies in the Japanese language. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology dissertation) sense and the clause to be pied-piped is head-final. To deduce this generalization, this paper first offers a labeling theoretic account of large-scale pied-piping. It then proposes that weak heads are (i) heads that have unvalued features and (ii) morpho-phonologically weak. It is shown that the generalization is deduced from this conception of weak heads, given Inaba’s (2011. The morphosyntax of constituent ordering patterns. The Hiroshima University Studies, Graduate School of Letters 71. 43–72) generalization that head-final complementizers are generally affixal. This paper further argues that the proposed conception of weak heads also allows us to deduce Agree from Minimal Search, which is a third factor principle according to Chomsky (2013. Problems of projection. Lingua 130. 33–49), hence minimizes UG.


Corresponding author: Hiromune Oda, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, E-mail:
This paper stems from chapter 4 of my dissertation (Oda 2022). I am grateful to Vicki Carstens, Ian Roberts, Mamoru Saito, and especially Željko Bošković for their invaluable comments and suggestions. I am also thankful to Victor Pan, Yuqiao Du, two anonymous reviewers of The Linguistic Review, and the audience at GLOW in Asia XIII, especially Masako Maeda, for helpful comments and discussions. This work is supported by JSPS KAKENHI #23K12153 and JSPS Core-to-Core Program, A. Advanced Research Networks “International Research Network for the Human Language Faculty” #JPJSCCAJ231702005 (PI: Yoichi Miyamoto). All remaining errors are of course my own.

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