Linguistics

'One' and 'ones' are complex determiners whose relation to their antecedent, when they have one, is mediated by a silent noun. They are never themselves nouns taking an antecedent directly. All non-local syntactic relations necessarily involve internal merge.

On the basis of considerations involving complementizers, sentence-final particles, 'need', aspect, tense, focus and topic, agreement morphemes, determiners, particles and adpositions, it appears that many more heads in the sentential projection line (and elsewhere) are silent than is usually thought. This reflects in part the fact that all projecting heads are technically silent (since they are just formal features),and in part the fact that the presence of phonological features precludes the presence of a(n other) specifier.

The study of English once and twice yields evidence that each  f them is actually a complex phrase containing two visible  orphemes and one silent one. Neither is a simple lexical item. The -ce morpheme is akin to a postposition, despite English
being primarily prepositional. The silent element associated with once and twice is a silent counterpart of time, represented as TIME. This instance of TIME is singular, even in the case of twice. There appears to be a link between TIME and the syntax of classifiers.
The presence of silent TIME with once and twice indirectly provides evidence for the presence in the human language faculty of other antecedentless silent nominal elements such as NUMBER. Silent elements of this sort are not visible (even via an antecedent) in the primary data available to the learner. Their properties, for example, their singularity or plurality and their licensing conditions, therefore provide us with a privileged window onto the invariant core of the language faculty itself.
The presence of silent elements such as TIME and NUMBER can, in part, be traced back to a principle of decompositionality, to the effect that the human language faculty imposes a maximum of one interpretable syntactic feature per lexical item.

If we take the identity in form between expletive 'there' and various other instances of 'there' (not only locative 'there', but also deictic 'there' and the 'there' of 'thereby') not to be accidental, we are led to the conclusion that expletive 'there' originates DP-internally as an instance of deictic 'there' (as in non-standard 'that there book') and that the definiteness effect plays out entirely DP-internally as a conflict between deictic 'there' and certain determiners.

In working toward an understanding of the syntactic component of the human language faculty, syntacticians necessarily ask question after question.  One prominent question is:
(1)  What properties do all languages have in common?
A related question is:
(2)  How exactly do languages vary in their syntax and what are the principled limits on that variation?

Phrases of the form ‘numeral + noun’ never involve direct  merger of numeral and noun. In every case, derivations are more complex than that. With 'one', there is, in addition to a
classifier, the necessary presence of 'single'/'only', whether pronounced or silent. With 2-4, coordinate structures are  involved. With 5 on up, silent SET is necessarily present.

1. The antisymmetry proposal of Kayne (1994) took the Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA) to see sub-word-level structure as well as phrasal structure. 1 This integration of morphology and syntax, as far as the LCA is concerned, recalls Greenberg's (1966) Universal 27: (1) If a language is exclusively suffixing, it is postpositional; if it is exclusively prefixing, it is prepositional. To the extent that (1) is correct, it, too, supports the idea that morphology is similar to and interacts strongly with phrasal syntax, at least as far as affixes (prefixes/suffixes) and adpositions (prepositions/postpositions) are concerned. 2 A specific example of the relevance of the LCA to morphology comes up if we look at the prefix vs. suffix question: (2) prefix-stem (3) stem-suffix The LCA has the immediate consequence that the structural relation between prefix and stem cannot be the same as the structural relation between suffix and stem. A prefix must (setting aside remnant movement possibilities) asymmetrically c-command the associated stem, 3 whereas a suffix can never asymmetrically c-command the associated stem, given the LCA. An antisymmetry-based view of syntax and morphology therefore leads to the expectation that we should find asymmetries between prefixes and suffixes, both language-internally and cross-linguistically. A view of syntax and morphology without antisymmetry would not lead to such an expectation. ———————————— 1 See especially sections 4.4 and 4.5. 2 On the strong relation between morphology and syntax, cf.

The (Italian) pair '*il luo libro' vs. 'il suo libro' (‘the his/her book’) that is typical of Romance lends itself to an account of the first in terms of constraints also seen in the syntax of compounding, and to an account of the second that links its 's-', despite initial appearances, to what we think of as Romance reflexive 's-'. We might informally call this pair an instance of suppletion, as long as we recognize that calling it suppletion falls short of an account.

A central aspect of comparative syntax calls for discovering generalizations over cross-linguistic differences and similarities, and then trying to understand, in general UG terms or beyond, why a given cross-linguistic correlation should hold in the first place. The primary importance of this type of comparative syntax work lies in the fact that it provides us with new kinds of evidence bearing on questions concerning the general character of the language faculty. Figuring out what cross-linguistic generalizations hold and why exactly they hold will invariably help us to narrow down the set of hypotheses that we entertain about the language faculty. In this paper, I will be interested in English is to (as in You are to return by midnight), when is to is studied from a (Romance and Germanic) comparative syntax perspective.

Many Germanic languages have a finite-clause complementizer that resembles a demonstrative, e.g. English that, Dutch dat, German dass. No Romance language does. The traditional view of complementizers as simplex projecting heads that take IP or some comparable category as complement has no way of accounting for this difference between Germanic and Romance. In this talk, I will attempt to make progress toward an account, in part by reinterpreting finite-clause complementizers as relative pronouns.

There is an answer to the question why bare 'long' and 'a long time' differ in the way they do, with 'a long time' showing no need for negation at all. The reason is that 'a long time' contains no silent TIME in need of licensing. The apparent negative polarity status of bare 'long' is, indirectly, just a side effect of its containing TIME.