Philip, Joy; (2013) (Dis)harmony, the Head-Proximate Filter, and linkers. Journal of Linguistics , 49 (1) pp. 165-213. 10.1017/s0022226712000163.

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Abstract

This paper presents a notion of harmonic word order that leads to a new generalisation over the presence or absence of disharmony cross-linguistically: for linkers – syntactically independent, semantically vacuous heads marking a relationship – disharmony is ungrammatical, while for any other head disharmony is simply dispreferred. Harmony is defined here by the interaction of three independently motivated word order constraints operating over the base-generated structure: linear proximity between a superordinate lexical head and the head of its dependent, uniformity in direction of headedness, and the preference for clausal dependents to follow their head. It is proposed that disharmony occurs where either a lexical head or a head bearing syntactic features encoding semantics has an ordering rule of its own. These proposals are shown to be empirically superior to the Final-Over-Final Constraint (Holmberg 2000, Biberauer, Holmberg & Roberts 2007 and subsequent work), in terms of both what is permitted and what is disallowed.

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