In these remarks on the relationship between typology and theoretical (morpho)syntax, we touch briefly on three issues: what is their relationship in practice now, what relationship should one in principle expect given the founding goals of each enterprise, and what kind of research could help connect the two fields in a more productive way in the future.
Assessing current practiceWe see signs that work in theoretical syntax is being influenced more and more by the methodology and results of typological work. The Greenberg universals of word order (Greenberg 1963) have been incorporated into the generative theory of phrase structure for a long time, at least since Stowell's (1981) reduction of explicit phrase structure rules to more general principles. Perhaps the most discussed formal research of the late 1990s was Cinque's (1999) study of clause structure, which made use of the typological results of Bybee (1985) and related work; Cinque also performed his own survey of more than 500 languages. Julien (2002) is another important example of this emerging genre. In a similar spirit, Baker (1996) attempted to incorporate and explain some of Nichols ' (1986, 1992) typological observations about head marking languages into his theory of polysynthesis, and Baker's (2003) theory of lexical categories is informed by typological studies like Stassen (1997) andWetzer (1996).More generally, we sampled four recent issues of Linguistic Inquiry and four of Natural Language & Linguistic Theory (two leading venues for formal syntactic work). Of the 27 articles on syntax in these issues, the mean number of languages discussed per article was 3.37 (ranging from 1 to 8 languages). We suspect that this is much higher than it would have been 25 years ago.But there are also signs that the integration of typology and formal theory is progressing more slowly and more sporadically than one might hope. Cinque's research has been widely admired, and widely cited, but not widely imitated.
This paper reports on an effort to develop a linguistically-informed annotation scheme for sluicing (Ross, 1969), ellipsis that leaves behind a wh-phrase. We describe a scheme for annotating the elided content, both in terms of a free text representation and its degree of correspondence with its antecedent. We demonstrate that we can achieve reasonable IAA (α between .78 and .88 across eight annotation types) and describe some of the novel patterns that have arisen from this effort.
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