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New Trends in Language Acquisition Within the Generative Perspective pp 3–25Cite as

One Feature—One Head: Features as Functional Heads in Language Acquisition and Attrition

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Part of the book series: Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics ((SITP,volume 49))

Abstract

This chapter explores the ramifications of envisaging an architecture of syntax in which each functional projection (head) consists of only one singleton feature. Following Kayne, (2005), I refer to this as the One Feature—One Head (1F1H) architecture. Beyond providing a sketch of the core desiderata associated with this architecture, I discuss how L1 and L2 acquisition would take place within the 1F1H-architecture, demonstrating that analyses undertaken in the Feature Reassembly-model can be directly subsumed into this architecture in a straightforward and conceptually appealing way. Finally, I turn my attention to language attrition, addressing how the 1F1H-architecture adopts a version of Scontras et al.’s, (2018) call for representational economy in the grammatical representations of languages affected by attrition (see also Putnam et al., 2019).

This manuscript has benefited from comments and questions during GALA 13 and other discussions as well as thoughtful comments and questions from two anonymous reviewers. I am especially grateful to Antonio Fábregas, Terje Lohndal, Jason Rothman, Liliana Sánchez, and Tom Stroik for comments and criticisms on an earlier version. Finally, I would like to thank Robert Klosinski for his editing assistance. All remaining shortcomings are the fault of the author.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Rizzi’s extended CP has since been expanded to many other languages, such as German (see, e.g., te Velde 2017).

  2. 2.

    For ease of exposition, we will continue to label the branching projection associated with these features as specifiers, while acknowledging that this terminology and the function of these structural units are a matter of debate (see, e.g., Starke 2009, 2011; Lohndal 2014).

  3. 3.

    For earlier attempts establishing a tripartite division of label of functional domains in the syntax, see Platzack (2000), Grohmann (2003) and Putnam (2007).

  4. 4.

    Some exo-skeletal approaches to event decomposition adopt the approach that lexical elements void of argument structure and some phonological information are inserted into the syntax as category-neutral √roots. To establish their categorical status, these √roots are introduced by a light functional head (e.g., v, n, etc.). Establishing the exact properties of √roots is a matter of ongoing debate (see e.g., Alexiadou et al. 2014). Here we attempt to make categorial distinctions post-syntactic rather than relying on light heads. See also Borer (2013) for an exo-skeletal approach that does not postulate light functional heads to introduce √roots.

  5. 5.

    The role of Merge in structure building takes center stage in this debate. Is Merge understood to be free (Boeckx 2010, 2014) or is it driven by some interpretive, preferably feature-driven component (Stroik 2009)? Although we leave this debate for future concern, the structural design of language proposed by Stroik and Putnam (2013) and its suggestion that interpretable features projected throughout syntactic structure can comply with nanosyntactic desiderata. To achieve this, the model would have to abandon certain assumptions about the lexicon (in Chap. 2), but aside from this issue, their model would provide a derivational account of the fseq suggested by Ramchand and Svenonius (2014) and Wiltschko (2014) that is a discrete combinatorial system rather than a recursive-embedded one (see Nordström 2017, 2018).

  6. 6.

    The notion of phrasal movement resembles Stroik’s (1999) Survive Principle to the extent that both operations motivate syntactic movement, or ‘repulsion’ in this case, by the need to optimize Full Interpretation.

  7. 7.

    Here we take Inf to represent the subcomponents of event structure proposed in Ramchand (2008).

  8. 8.

    An anonymous reviewer raises the question as to whether this hierarchy can be understood as a continuum between syntactic structure and morphology. Such an analogy cannot be established, because each designation in Biberauer and Roberts’s (2017) hierarchy refers to the range of a class functional heads that share a particular feature or attribute, with nanoparameters referring to the smallest subset of functional heads.

  9. 9.

    The generation of mental representations, including linguistic representations, is gradient to varying degrees. The production of S- and L-trees and as well as their interface is best understood as probabilistic in nature. The architecture and structures described here are compatible with Bod’s (2009) probabilistic tree structures.

  10. 10.

    Putnam (2017) makes the case for feature-valuation via constraint satisfaction and illustrates how this can be achieved in LFG. Although this is traditionally understood as a lexicalist framework, the appeal of a distributed mapping system of features and attributes is similar in some respects to the interpretation of lexical entries in Nanosyntax. A fundamental difference between Putnam (2017) and this exposition is in the nature of syntactic projections.

  11. 11.

    The situation becomes a bit more complicated with the source grammars of a bilingual differ on parameters such as the morphophonology of the expression of particular features, whether or not a particular feature is covert (as in the sense of Cho and Slabakova (2014) discussed above, or if word order difference between the two exist. Goldrick et al. (2016) present a probabilistic, constraint-based account of code-switching that could be integrated into the 1F1H-architecture. I leave this for future research considerations.

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  1. Penn State University, State College, PA, USA

    Michael T. Putnam

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  1. Michael T. Putnam
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  1. Department of Spanish, Modern and Classical Philology, University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Baleares, Spain

    Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes

  2. Department of Spanish, Modern and Classical Philology, University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Baleares, Spain

    Cristina Suárez-Gómez

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Putnam, M.T. (2020). One Feature—One Head: Features as Functional Heads in Language Acquisition and Attrition. In: Guijarro-Fuentes, P., Suárez-Gómez, C. (eds) New Trends in Language Acquisition Within the Generative Perspective. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 49. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1932-0_1

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