Филологические науки/4.Синтаксис: структура, семантика, функция

Makovska O.O., Vakhotskyi M.M., Lekhkun G.V.

Bukovinian State Medical University, Chernivtsi, Ukraine

Nanosyntax as a New Linguistic Approach

The aim of the given research is to introduce a recent development in formal syntax referred to as “nanosyntax”.

Nanosyntax is an approach to syntax in which syntactic parse trees are built from a large number of syntactic constituents. Each morpheme may correspond to several such elements, which do not have to form a “subtree”.

Some recent work in theoretical linguistics suggests that the "atoms" of syntax are much smaller than words or morphemes. From that it immediately follows that the responsibility of syntax is not limited to ordering “preconstructed” words. Instead, within the framework of nanosyntax, the words are derived entities built in syntax, rather than primitive elements supplied by a lexicon.

The beginnings of nanosyntax can be traced to a 1993 article by Kenneth Hale and S. Jay Keyser titled “On Argument Structure and the Lexical Representation of Syntactic Relations”, which first introduced the concept of l-syntax [1].

Nanosyntax is a new approach to the architecture of grammar, which integrates the results of 30 years of Principle & Parameters research as well as the growing structuralization of semantics.

The essential building block of nanosyntax is the simple observation that the terminal nodes of syntactic structures have become very small as syntactic trees grew, and at some point they crossed the line to become smaller than a morpheme – terminals have become “submorphemic”. This simple fact, noted many times, leads to profound and wide-ranging consequences once it is taken seriously.

One immediate consequence is that morphemes and words can no longer be the spellout of a single terminal. Rather, a single morpheme must “span” several syntactic terminals, and therefore corresponds to an entire syntactic phrase. This in turn means that entire syntactic phrases are stored in the lexicon (not just terminals) and it also means that there cannot be any lexicon before the syntax – i.e. syntax does not “project from the lexicon”, syntax rather “creates” lexical items by assembling the trees which will constitute lexical items [2].

Here is a snapshot of research [3] currently being done in nanosyntax:

Michal Starke's work [4] on the architecture underpinning nanosyntax, on deriving allomorphy patterns in English irregular verbs from competition in spelling out syntactic trees, on phrasal templatic effects in Bantu partial reduplication, seen as lexically stored syntactic trees associated with a phonological template.

Gillian Ramchand's work [5] on deriving syntactic verb classes from the idea that their various syntactic and semantic behaviours derive from the fact that they correspond to various sizes of syntactic structure, as well as ongoing joint work with Michal Starke to rework the architecture of grammar in order to capture the growing integration of formal semantics and fine-grained syntax.

Tarald Taraldsen's work [6] on noun classes in Bantu, in which he derives the syncretism patterns among the various instances of class markers from their structural subset/superset relationships – a pioneering approach to a traditionally mysterious topic, which also provides an insight into why some languages have many noun classes while others have few or none – again this follows from the various structural sizes of noun class affixes and nouns themselves across languages.

Pavel Caha's work [7] on case theory: cases such as Nominative, Accusatives, etc are shown to be structural subsets of each other. Not only does each case span several syntactic terminals, but they stand in an implicational relationship to each other. Caha shows that nanosyntax yields a natural explanation for syncretism patterns, and that his new approach offers an explanation for syncretism patterns in morphological case systems and a new semantic interpretation of case. He has also discovered phonological templatic effects on Czech infinitival verbs and shown how they can be mapped onto a fine-grained syntax (joint work with T. Scheer).

Peter Svenonius' research [8] on adpositional systems and how they relate to the semantics of space. Svenonius shows on the one hand that cross-linguistic patterns of adpositions and verbs can be understood once their syntax and semantics is carefully studied and they are seen to realize different spans of syntactic terminals. In related work, Svenonius explores the important question of which ingredients of the semantics of space are grammaticalized as tiny syntactic terminals and which belong to the general conceptual domain.

Marina Pantcheva's work [9] on syncretisms and underlying structures of goal /source/place prepositions, Minjeong Son's work on verbs and prepositions in Korena, Antonio Fabregas' work on the noun phrases in Spanish.

Two recent PhD dissertations, by Peter Muriungi and Bjorn Lundqvist, discuss the syntax of Bantu verbs and eventive noun phrases respectively, on the premise that these items realise phrasal elements and that their varying sizes and syntax explain their syntactic behaviour.

Bibliography

1. Nanosyntax [E-resource] : available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanosyntax

2. What is Nanosyntax [E-resource] : available at: http://nanosyntax.auf.net/whatis.html

3. Nanosyntax Research [E-resource] : available at http://nanosyntax.auf.net/research.html

4. Starke M. Nanosyntax: A short primer to a new approach to language / Michal Starke. – Tromsø: UiT, 2009. – P. 1–6.

5. Ramchand G. Verb Meaning and the Lexicon / Gillian Ramchand. – Cambridge: CUP, 2010. – 217 p.

6. Taraldsen K. T. The nanosyntax of Nguni noun class prefixes and concords / Knut Tarald Taraldsen // Lingua. – 2010. – Vol. 120. – Iss. 6. – P. 1522–1548.

7. Caha P. The Nanosyntax of Case : Ph.D. thesis / Pavel Caha. – Tromsø: UiT, 2009. – 321 p.

8. Svenonius P. Slavic prefixes inside and outside VP / Peter Svenonius // Special issue on Slavic prefixes; ed. by Peter Svenonius. – Tromsø, 2004. – P. 205–253.

9. Blagoeva Pantcheva M. Decomposing Path. The Nanosyntax of Directional Expressions / Marina Blagoeva Pantcheva. – Tromsø: UiT, 2011. – 303 p.