Syntactic repairs and cyclic optimization

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Fabian Heck
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 439622645

The project 'Syntactic Repairs and Cyclic Optimization' investigates the phenomenon of repairs in syntax. The notion of repair (closely related to the concept of 'last resort') can be characterized as follows. There is a well-established principle G of grammar that typically bans a particular property P from showing up in a linguistic expression E. Nevertheless, one can observe that sometimes P emerges in E (under apparent violation of G). Moreover, when P shows up in E, then, intuitively, this happens in order to prevent E from violatinganother very important constraint. Under such conditions, P is said to 'repair' E. A typical example for a repair is the employment of resumptive pronouns with displacement in many languages. Such resumption is normally blocked but becomes obligatory in contexts where displacement would otherwise violate some locality constraint. Empirically, the project seeks to provide a taxonomy of repairs from various languages. On the theoretical side, the mainpoints of departure are the following. a) First, there is the well-established insight that repairs lend themselves straightforwardly to an optimality theoretic analysis. This is becausethe notion of last resort, if taken seriously, only makes sense in a framework that determines grammaticality by allowing linguistic expressions to compete. b) Second, there is the (lessestablished) observation that repairs sometimes exhibit what is called opacity (or myopia). Opacity is given, for instance, if an expression E does not exhibit a property (here: a repair) it is expected to. Under a derivational theory, opacity can be accounted for straightforwardly. In a nutshell, the gist is that optimization cannot reach the global optimum because it is computed on the basis of limited information that is available at an early stage of the derivation, which is empirically correct. Thus, the existence of capacity in repairs points to a derivational approach to optimization, or, in other terms, to optimization being cyclic. a) poses a Problem for cyclic theories of syntax that lack the notion of optimization(such as, e.g., the Minimalist Program). On the other hand, b) is a stumble block for theories of optimization that lack a cyclic component (such as parallel Optimality Theory). Accordingly, a central hypothesis of the project, which is to be tested, is that all repairs in syntax involve cyclic optimization. Another question that will be pursued is whether an analysis of repairs that is couched within a theory without competition (without ranked and violable constraints), such as the Minimalist Program, that preserves the core characteristics of the notion of a repair is feasible.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5175: Cyclic Optimization