Nanosyntax: state of the art and recent developments
Pavel Caha, Karen De Clercq, Michal Starke, Guido Vanden Wyngaerd
December 2024 

In recent years, the work in Nanosyntax has made significant progress on all kinds of questions linked to phrasal lexicalisation, the key feature of Nanosyntax. One of these major questions is what mechanisms are responsible for generating the structures that comply with the restrictions imposed by phrasal lexicalisation. Starke’s (2018) answer to this question was the lexicalisation algorithm. The lexicalisation algorithm was introduced as a simple, constrained and algorithmic process of externalization of syntactic structures. It takes the universal syntactic hierarchy or functional sequence (fseq) as an input and produces language-particular outputs due to its interaction with two other components of the grammar: the postsyntactic lexicon on the one hand and the syntactic derivation on the other hand. In effect, the algorithm steers the derivation in such a way that language-particular structures are formed as a function of language-particular lexicons. Work since 2018 has been marked by two important evolutions. The first of these is the realization that lexicalisation is not only affected by the size of lexical entries, but also by their structural shape. Two lexical entries of the same size may give rise to different patterns of lexicalisation by organising the same projections into different structures. The second innovation is more fundamental, in that it involves a change to the formulation of the Lexicalisation Algorithm itself. This paper introduces the algorithm and summarizes the results of recent studies that discuss the algorithm, explores its predictions and consequences, as well as proposed modifications to it.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007744 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	in press, first chapter in "Nanosyntax and the Lexicalisation Algorithm", edited by Pavel Caha, Karen De Clercq and Guido Vanden Wyngaerd
keywords:	nanosyntax, state of the art, phrasal lexicalisation, lexicalisation algorithm, subextraction, morphology, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [November 2023] v1 [October 2023]
Downloaded:	1282 times

 

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