2013 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

Examining Phase Theory: Internal Merge and Syntactic Behavior of Complementizers

Research Project

Project/Area Number	24720219
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
Allocation Type	Multi-year Fund
Research Field	English linguistics
Research Institution	Tokyo University of Science (2013) Mie University (2012)
Principal Investigator	OBATA Miki 東京理科大学, 理学部, 准教授 (80581694)
Project Period (FY)	2012-04-01 – 2014-03-31
Keywords	生成文法 / 併合 / 転送 / Cape Verdean Creole
Research Abstract	This research project mainly focused on [1] how the human language faculty, especially syntactic knowledge, is organized, and [2] how syntactic representations constructed in narrow syntax are sent to the interfaces by the Transfer operation. With respect to [1], I examined mechanisms of the Merge operation from a crosslinguistic point of view, which is one of the structure-building operations, by collecting and analyzing the data from Cape Verdean Creole. Regarding [2], I suggested that the Transfer operation is in fact applied "weakly". In other words, Transfer renders syntactic representations invisible to further operations in narrow syntax and does not omit them completely from narrow syntax. I also showed that this claim is supported in terms of labeling.

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