A Syntactic Universal and Its Consequences
- Submitting institution
-
University of Cambridge
- Unit of assessment
- 11 - Computer Science and Informatics
- Output identifier
- 1847
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
-
10.1162/ling_a_00153
- Title of journal
- Linguistic Inquiry
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 169
- Volume
- 45
- Issue
- 2
- ISSN
- 0024-3892
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- January
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
2
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Citation count
- 39
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The Final over Final Condition is an important and original generalisation concerning constraints on word order across languages. The constraint claims that, in a given local domain, a head-final category cannot take a head-initial category as its complement. We present evidence that the constraint is operative in a range of constructions across many unrelated languages, and argue that it is a universal. This would be the first clear case of a genuinely hierarchical universal to be discovered, and provides new evidence for the strong generative capacity of natural-language grammars.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
