Luigi Rizzi
Cartography and Grammatical Explanation
Speaker
-
Luigi Rizzi
Luigi Rizzi
Luigi Rizzi is Professor of General Linguistics at Collège de France. He was on the faculty of the University of Geneva, the University of Siena, and MIT. He was visiting professor at UCLA, Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris, Rue d’Ulm), UMass Amherst. At the University of Geneva, he was Principal Investigator of the ERC project “Syntactic Cartography and Locality in Adult Grammar and Language Acquisition”.
His research interests include syntactic theory and comparative syntax. He contributed to the development of the parametric approach to syntactic comparison, to the theory of locality (Relativized Minimality), to the cartography of syntactic structures.
He also works on language acquisition, with particular reference to the development of morphosyntax, and the role of the theory of locality in language acquisition.
Abstract →
Luigi Rizzi
Cartography and Grammatical Explanation
The cartography of syntactic structures is both a descriptive and a theoretical endeavor. Cartographic projects have a large comparative dimension: we want to know what the fine details are of syntactic configurations across languages, what structural properties are invariant, what properties are variable, and what the limits are of the attested variation of syntactic structures (Cinque & Rizzi 2010, Rizzi & Cinque 2016). It should be clear, though, that the systematic identification of the right maps is only the beginning of the analytic work: we want to connect the observed generalizations to the basic ingredients of syntactic computations and determine to what extent the observed configurations can be deduced from a system of basic operations, of principles constraining them, and of parameters expressing irreducible variation. If we look at things in this way, cartographic analysis can be seen as a powerful generator of well-defined empirical questions, which can nourish and guide theoretical work in syntax, thus enriching and consolidating the empirical basis of syntactic theory. Along these lines, cartographic research can fruitfully interact with theoretical work conducted within the minimalist program (Chomsky 1995 and much subsequent work), but also with other traditions of comparative and typological research on natural language.
In this talk, I will address some concrete cases illustrating these points. I will focus on the study of the left periphery of the clause (see Rizzi and Bocci 2017 for an overview of twenty years of research) and illustrate the explanatory role of different principles operating in syntax or at the interfaces with sound and meaning in capturing various cartographic properties, with special reference to properties of ordering and freezing.
Selected references:
Cinque, G. & L. Rizzi (2010) “The Cartography of Syntactic Structures”. In The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, B. Heine and H. Narrog (eds). New York: Oxford University Press.
Chomsky, N. (1995) The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
Rizzi, L. & Bocci, G. (2017) “The left periphery of the clause – Primarily illustrated for Italian”, in the Blackwell Companion to Syntax, II edition
Rizzi, L. & G. Cinque (2016) “Functional categories and syntactic theory”. In Annual Review of Linguistics, 2, 2016, pp. 139-163.