Cartography and Explanatory Adequacy

This book contributes to the ongoing empirical, conceptual, and meta-theoretical debates regarding the merits and drawbacks of the cartographic program in linguistic theory. Although cartography has its roots in the study of the left periphery, its empirical scope has expanded significantly over the years and now covers a wide range of domains such as argument structure, modification, and constituent order. The chapters in this volume offer a critical examination of the cartographic assumption that there is a rich array of functional projections whose hierarchical order is fixed and determined by Universal Grammar. They discuss the nature of these cartographic hierarchies and their relation to the central theoretical goal of explanatory adequacy: are functional hierarchies an irreducible property of Universal Grammar (hence constituting part of the ＂residue＂ beyond the scope of principled explanation), or are they emergent, deriving from independent principles that do not require a further enrichment of Universal Grammar?

à ngel J. Gallego, Associate Professor, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Dennis Ott, IKERBASQUE Research Fellow, University of the Basque Country

à ngel J. Gallego is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish Philology and a member of the Centre de LingÃ1/4Ã-stica Teòrica at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He works in the areas of theoretical syntax and linguistic variation, with a focus on what syntactic phenomena such as locality, phase structure, and transformations can reveal about the Language Faculty. He is the author of The Syntactic Variation of Spanish Dialects (OUP, 2019) and co-editor, with Roberta D’Alessandro and Irene Franco, of The Verbal Domain (OUP, 2017).

Dennis Ott is an IKERBASQUE research fellow at the University of the Basque Country in Vitoria-Gasteiz, having previously held positions at the University of Groningen, Humboldt University of Berlin, and the University of Ottawa. His research explores the formal principles behind the syntax of natural languages, and how the mental grammar behind these principles interfaces with systems of interpretation and articulation. He is the co-editor, with Vera Lee-Schoenfeld, of Parameters of Predicate Fronting (OUP, 2021).