Richard Kayne
New York University

Richard Kayne

New York University
United States

Antisymmetry and linear order

There are no mirror-image pairs of languages. That is, there is no pair of languages A and B such that for every sentence of A the corresponding sentence of B is the mirror-image of that sentence of A. This is so, whether we take mirror-image to be calculated in terms of word order, or in terms of morpheme order. This restriction on the otherwise vast set of possible languages must be accounted for. Once we take hierarchical structure into account, it also holds that no individual sentence in any language has a mirror-image counterpart (that preserves hierarchical structure) in any other language (or in itself). This is also true of any subpart of any sentence in any language. Another way to think of this is that hierarchical structure unambiguously determines linear order; the language faculty allows a language no option. Additional, more specific, claims are that every phrase has the linear order S(pecifier)-H(ead)-C(omplement) and that all syntactic movement is leftward.

The most dramatic predictions of antisymmetry are cross-linguistic ones. In effect, antisymmetry brings strongly together under one common roof a substantial number of Greenbergian generalizations about word order, providing a single, unified theoretical account of them unavailable to Greenberg himself sixty or so years ago.