5 - Theoretical syntax: the generative tradition

Summary

While typologists stress the gradual transition between lexical and functional categories, generative syntacticians have tended to make a sharp distinction, which plays a central role in some of the theories of syntax proposed. In this chapter I will evaluate this claim.

First I will review the history of functional categories in the generative tradition, starting with the work of Chomsky in Barriers (1986b) and of Abney (1987), work which has established the importance of these categories in syntactic theory. In these works it was postulated that functional categories were syntactic heads in their own right. Earlier generative grammar had recognised functional categories, but a first theoretical treatment of these came in the work of Abney, who extended the discussion about functional categories to the noun phrase. Guéron, Hoekstra, van Riemsdijk, and Grimshaw developed a notion of ‘extended projection’, in which the projections of lexical categories are wedded to the projections of related functional categories.

Then I will turn to extensions of the inventory of functional categories, such as Cinque's and Rizzi's work, which charted the course for cross-linguistic comparative work in this area and postulated universal complex functional projections in the Inflection Phrase (IP) domain involving a series of semantic categories.

The reason for selecting the generative tradition over other grammatical traditions is that within this tradition functional categories have probably been treated mostly as autonomous entities (as opposed to say, features on a lexical head).