On the relative cycle

Abstract

This chapter investigates linguistic cycles in order to shed light on the general principles of language change, in the light of certain recent developments in syntactic theory, in particular Kayne’s (2016) proposal that all heads are necessarily silent. If this approach is on the right track, it would have major consequences for economy-based theories of language change that make heavy use of spec-to-head reanalyses. Instead of a spec-to-head reanalysis, we propose that cycles can be accounted for in terms of a change in the silent nominals that an item can be paired with. The testing ground of our claim is provided by the history of Italian relativizers.