Volume 23, Issue 2

The rigors of the Minimalist Program eliminate movement operations, traces, and 1980s-style conditions of government. This article emphasizes poverty-of-stimulus problems, reviews lexical government effects, and captures them (and more) by treating certain deletion as cliticization. This analysis carves up the grammatical world differently, linking former “movement” conditions with phonological reductions, VP ellipsis, gapped verbs, some agreement relations, etc. The productivity of the analysis supports the rigors of the Minimalist Program.

This article presents two case studies concerning verb second (V2) in German. It investigates two different phenomena where the characteristic verb raising in German in blocked. The relevant data show clearly that the V2 rule is not blind with respect to the interfaces. It is not merely a syntactic movement rule whose output is interpreted by the phonological component on the one hand and by the conceptual-intentional system on the other. It is rather the case that both systems restrict V2, they have a direct influence on the verb getting to its final position. This article thus focuses on both sides of grammar: phonology on the one hand, and interpretation, meaning and semantics on the other. Hence, the present study is trying to balance out the interface restrictions on X 0 -raising – illustrated using verb second in German (and to a certain degree in French). It is shown that parsing strategies guide V2: phonological processing as well as interpretation-related parsing.

This article explores the properties of interrogative/focus particle li in Bulgarian, in the larger context of the clitic system of that language as well as from the perspective of how li and other clitics behave in related Slavic languages. A highly derivational model of grammar is assumed, with Minimalist syntax and Distributed Morphology. As an alternative to scattered deletion, prosodically sensitive principles of linearization apply on the post-syntactic side of the grammar. Bulgarian special clitics cannot be Utterance initial; hence, very late in the derivation, they undergo (Reordering) Merger to be linearized at the right of the prosodic word to their right. It is argued that interrogative li , as an enclitic, linearizes upon vocabulary insertion on the right of the prosodic word to its right. Focus li , however, occurs with a focused phrase in its specifier, hence is pronounced to the right of this phrase, with non-focus material elided.