Module Interaction and Category Theory

Abstract

In this book we provided a principled account of nominalizations in Quechua, relating their morphology and semantics to their syntactic structure. From this account a number of differences between Quechua and other languages with respect to their category systems emerge. We claim that the typology of categories in natural languages is not accounted for in one single component, i.e. Phrase Structure, but results from the interaction of various subsystems. In the light of the analyses presented in this book, we further explore this issue, showing how the properties of Quechua discovered in previous chapters are related to one another in clusters. We will argue for a module interaction approach to parametric variation. This approach is characterized by the assumption that variation between languages results from differences in the way the various modules of the grammar interact. There is no parametric variation inside the modules themselves, and UG does not specify immediately how elements in one module relate to those in another one, since each module is defined in terms of a separate vocabulary: elements from different modules can therefore be related in different ways.