9 - Syntax in OLG

Summary

Chapter 9, the longest chapter, presents a step-by-step discussion of the OLG theory of syntax, focusing especially on issues of central concern to syntacticians: phrase structure, movement or filler-gap dependencies, and the architecture of grammar. A detailed walk-through of how to derive an English sentence is given, including formal definitions of syntactic features. Analyses of the range of typological variation observed in relevant word-order, case-marking and information-structural phenomena are presented from an OLG perspective, including detailed case studies of the Faroese clause structure facts presented in Chapter 2 and an in-depth treatment of object shift in Scandinavian languages. Ranking arguments, constraint definitions and factorial typologies are given where needed. Chapter 9 is intended to answer most of the major questions regarding how this theory handles a broader range of data.