Alternatives to cartography (review)

Alternatives to cartography (ATC) is a significant volume in linguistic theory: it includes ten articles that should constitute key readings for all linguists interested in the theory of the core structures underlying natural language syntax. The volume is significant not only for introducing readers to important current (and future) directions in syntactic theory, but also for signaling the beginning of a potential change in the tide of generative grammar publications—away from what is known as 'cartography' (e.g. Rizzi 1997, 2004a, Cinque 1999) and toward 'alternatives to cartography', necessitated by the empirical and conceptual challenges faced by the cartographic program as outlined throughout this volume.

Cartography evolved from the extension of Chomskyan X'-syntax (Jackendoff 1977) to grammatico-functional categories (Chomsky 1986, Abney 1987), whereby any syntactic head participates in identical structural relations: the head-complement relation, the head-specifier relation, and, in most accounts, the phrase-adjunct relation. At a certain stage, the inventory of so-called functional categories was thought to be limited to IP, CP, DP, and vP. However, after Pollock (1989) proposed decomposing IP into TP and AgrP, and Rizzi (1997) proposed decomposing the CP 'left-periphery' into ForceP, TopicP, FocusP, and Fin(iteness)P, modern cartography was born. ¹

Cartography is a research program that seeks to map syntactic structure in as highly an atomized fashion as possible. In particular, cartography proposes that every piece of morphology has unique syntactic status. Thus, in the ATC introduction, Jeroen van Craenenbroeck takes Cinque and Rizzi's (2009) 'one feature one head' (OFOH) principle, given in 1, as definitional of cartography.

1. 1. ONE FEATURE ONE HEAD: Each morphosyntactic feature corresponds to an independent syntactic head with a specific slot in the functional hierarchy. (1)

Significant corollaries of OFOH, such as those in 2-4, are also central to cartography.

1. 2. UNIVERSAL CARTOGRAPHIC HIERARCHIES: All syntactic categories are hierarchically structured and appear in a unique order (determined by universal grammar).

The statement in 2 involves the common assumption that all categories are present in all languages; lack of overt morphological manifestations in any given language is a (nonproblematic) lexical matter. The evidence in favor of unique order takes the form of transitivity arguments: if A > B and B > C, then A > C, as argued to hold for adverbs in a range of languages in Cinque 1999—something adjunction approaches to adverbs might not predict.

1. 3. DERIVATIONAL OPTIONS: Any deviation from the expected order results from movement. The following (leftward) movements can derive surface word-order patterns: (i) head movement, (ii) phrasal remnant movement, and (iii) 'roll-up'.

Head movement is familiar from many generative works (e.g. Pollock 1989) and crucially interacts with cartography in deriving DP-internal N > A orders in Cinque 1994. Remnant movement (movement of a phrase out of which one element has been extracted) is known from VP-fronting operations in Germanic (Müller 1998) and is a possible alternative to head movement. 'Roll-up' (movement of a phrase a over an element ß, followed by further joint movement of [α + ß]) has been argued to derive word-order interactions among heads, complements, and modifiers (Cinque 2005).

1. 4. THERE IS NO ADJUNCTION (Kayne 1994, Cinque 1999). Traditional modifiers always occupy specifiers of dedicated functional projections that are part of the universal cartographic inventory.

The statement in 4 rules out both base-generated adjunction and movement into adjunct positions. Crucially, this entails that for every phrasal position, there is a unique local head whose effects can often be seen only indirectly, through adjacency and antiadjacency effects (Rizzi 1997).

Cartographic and noncartographic approaches to the (traditional) CP domain are shown in 5.

1. 5.

   1. a. Cartographic picture of CP domain (Rizzi 1997)

   2. b. Traditional (noncartographic) picture of CP domain

Since 2002, the 'Oxford comparative syntax' series has published six volumes on cartography (Cinque 2002, Belletti 2004, Rizzi 2004b, Cinque 2006, Cinque & Rizzi 2010, Benincà & Munaro 2011), whereas possible ALTERNATIVES to cartography have never before been presented...