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Rethinking Cartography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Richard K. Larson
Richard K. Larson*
Affiliation:
Stony Brook University
*
[Richard.Larson@stonybrook.edu]
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Abstract

The CARTOGRAPHIC PROGRAM has investigated interesting crosslinguistic linear orderings among various sentence constituents. Its signature technical move is to postulate HIERARCHIES OF FUNCTIONAL PROJECTIONS related by functional selection. I note three problems that functional hierarchies encounter in capturing linear order: ‘explanation’, ‘plenitude’, and ‘rigidity’. I compare linearity in cartography with linearity in the integers, which involves a single relation (<) ordering the domain. I consider work by Scontras et al. (2017) arguing for a single ‘inequality relation’ underlying the ordering of attributive adjectives in nominals and show how this result can be incorporated into a feature-driven theory of syntactic projection. This captures crosslinguistic linear orderings without appeal to functional selection or functional hierarchies.

Keywords

syntaxcartographyadjectivesfunctional selectionfunctional projectionssyntactic features

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 97 , Issue 2 , June 2021 , pp. 245 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

Early versions of this work were presented at the Second International Workshop on Syntactic Cartography (Beijing, 2017) and at the Biolinguistic Conference on Interface Asymmetries (NYU, 2017). My thanks to audiences at those event for comments and discussion, and my particular thanks to Si Fuzhen and Anna Maria Di Sciullo, the (respective) event organizers. I am grateful to two anonymous Language referees and to associate editors James McCloskey and Christina Tortora for critique and suggestions that considerably improved this work. Remaining errors and flaws are of course my own.

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