The articles assembled in this issue of the Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique contribute to our understanding of the role of asymmetric relations at the interfaces. Asymmetric relations have privileged status in the syntactic, phonological, and morphological derivation of linguistic expressions (see for example the articles in Di Sciullo 2003).

Interfaces are representations that must meet legibility conditions imposed by external systems. According to the Strong Minimalist Thesis (Chomsky 2001), language is an optimal solution to interface conditions, in that language is an optimal way to link sound and meaning. Questions arise regarding the properties of the interface representations that make them optimally legible by external systems. These properties could very well be abstract, and remote from the perceptual systems, and could bear on the form of interface representations, rather than on the interpretation of their parts. A strong hypothesis in this regard is that asymmetric relations are core properties of the relations derived by the grammar (Chomsky 1981, 1995, 2001; Kayne 1994; Moro 2000; Di Sciullo 2005; Zwart 2006). From this perspective, asymmetry is a pervasive property of derivations and interface representations; it is thus expected to be a property of different structural relations, such as the relation between a displaced constituent and its copy, the relation between an anaphor and its antecedent, the relation between a head and its dependent, and more generally, the relation between the constituents of a configuration.

For some adverbs, European and Brazilian Portuguese sharply differ, with consequences for the syntax of tense, quantification, word order, quantifier floating, wh-extraction, and clause structure. Evidence is provided for the architecture of the left, for remnant IP movement, and for the claim that “micro-” lexical differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese reduce to syntactic “macro-” variation: absence vs. presence of V-movement.

This study investigates the learning of Referential French by speakers of Acadian French at the university level. One difference between the two varieties lies in their use of auxiliaries in compound tenses. In Acadian French, avoir is used categorically in compound tenses with verbs of inherently directed motion and pronominal verbs, while Referential French uses être. A controlled-production task and an acceptability judgment task were administered to 80 speakers of New Brunswick Acadian French who were students at a francophone university in New Brunswick, 40 first-year students and 40 fourth-year students. Results show that, while there is still variability in the fourth-year students’ auxiliary use, their performance is significantly closer to Referential French than that of the first-year students.

We argue that Agree is an asymmetric relation. According to Asymmetric Agree, if x Agrees with y, then the features of y must be properly included in the features of x. If the links of a chain created by movement are related by Agree, this correctly predicts the properties of syntactic movement chains. And if the links of a chain created by movement are subject to the Proper Inclusion Condition, that accounts for the (un)availability of extraction out of a moved XP. The following distinctions interact with Asymmetric Agree: whether movement is A or A-bar, whether or not the constituent extracted out of the moved phrase is selected by the head of that phrase, and whether movement is overt or covert. Syntactic movement is feature-structure preserving, in that the Proper Inclusion Condition applies to sets of features in a particular configuration.

We present a sociolinguistic analysis of the third person plural verbal suffix -ont in the variety of Acadian French spoken in the northeastern region of New Brunswick. The analysis shows that variation in the use of this traditional morpheme is conditioned by external factors and in particular by social network. In addition, retention of -ont is conditioned by an internal factor, as this suffix regularizes the singular/plural contrast in stems, and the 3SG/3PL contrast in verbal paradigms. The more -ont optimizes these contrasts, the greater the tendency to maintain this morpheme. Thus, forms such as i-pouvont, i-voulont, and i-buvont— which allow speakers to communicate their identity and social position within their speech community as well as to optimize the use of forms in the verb paradigms — have a greater probability of being retained than other forms that offer fewer benefits.

We examine the evolution and current use of the French discourse marker mais dame, whose usage was first attested in Metropolitan French early in the 19th century. This expression has since fallen into disuse, to the point that many present-day Metropolitan French speakers do not even know it. We first determine the discourse functions of mais dame in literary texts (comedies and farces) from the 19th century. We then consider the use of mais dame in naturally occurring discourse, from conversational and narrative discourse with Newfoundland Franco-Acadians—descendants in part of 19th-century immigrants from France who speak a conservative variety of the language — who use the marker frequently. We find that the 19th-century literary usages anticipate the use of mais dame in Newfoundland French. Moreover, we show that mais dame plays an important role as an evaluative marker in oral narration.

I examine scope interaction between a wh-phrase and a quantified phrase (QP). Sloan-type sentences in Japanese are also discussed, based on Motomura’s analysis on zibun ‘self’. I show that Sloan’s original proposal is empirically inadequate, and propose an analysis based on the Hornstein/Kayne-type analysis of bound pronouns. One consequence is that scope determination must be understood to occur derivationally, based on the asymmetrical relationship between a wh-phrase and a QP at one point in the derivation. Also, only QPs collocated with an unchecked Case feature can be a probe for Q-absorption.

I examine computational issues in the processing of SOV languages in the probe-goal theory of the Minimalist Program. A theory that minimizes search, such as the probe-goal theory, provides a strong linguistic basis for the investigation of efficient parsing architecture. For parsing, two main design challenges are presented: (i) how to limit search while incrementally recovering structure from input without the benefit of a pre-determined lexical array, and (ii) how to come up with a system that not only correctly resolves parsing ambiguities, but does so with mechanisms that are architecturally justified. I take as the starting point an existing probe-goal parser with features that allow it to compute syntactic representation without recourse to derivation history search. I extend this parser to handle pre-nominal relative clauses of the sort found in SOV languages. I provide a unified computational account of facts on possessor (and non-possessor) relativization and processing preferences in Turkish, Japanese, and Korean.

I consider the empirical domain constituted by word order alternations in the verbal domain in English and Japanese. Based on the observation of prosodic properties of these alternations, a derivational analysis of the syntax-prosody interface is proposed in the context of a model of grammar in which linearization is determined by core syntax and the syntax-prosody interface. This approach crucially posits, and hence gives independent support for, two auxiliary assumptions: incremental structure building in the grammar and multiple spell-out into the phonological component.

I advance the thesis that the narrow syntactic component of CHL is purely symmetrical, with all apparent asymmetries reducing to interface conditions. Properties of Germanic object shift and scrambling, in particular the VO order-preservation (Holmberg’s Generalization), derive from symmetry-breaking strategies which dispose of superfluous (symmetric) syntactic information and ensure the PF-legibility (linearization). These interface desymmetrization strategies provide a Minimalist analysis of non-lexical (macro-)parameters, such as the head-directionality parameter.

The Linear Correspondence Axiom is reconciled with the VO/OV head parameter such that linear “shape” is preserved across the derivation. This allows object shift and scrambling to emerge as two sides of a single parametric coin. The implications of this system for the A/A-bar movement typology are explored, and a Minimalist reconceptualization is offered.

Recently, there has been a surge of psycholinguistic research on the interpretation of type-shifting constructions. We evaluate some of the theoretical and empirical research in this area and propose a reassessment of the nature of type-shifting operations.

We argue, in particular, for a structural gap in type-shifting constructions, motivated mainly by the restructuring nature of the verbs employed. We also argue that the putative underspecification (or indeterminacy) of type-shifting constructions is resolved via pragmatic inferences.

I present a derivational analysis of the construal of the focus structure of the sentence. I propose that the [+FOCUS] feature is an optional formal feature that can be assigned to multiple tokens of the numeration. Hence, the focus structure is derived via Merge (creation of a set) in a strictly compositional way. This theory circumvents the empirical and theoretical shortcomings of Nuclear Stress Rule-based approaches, and accounts for split focus constructions (answers to multiple wh-questions).

I argue that syntactic structure encodes three types of asymmetries. The first corresponds to the asymmetry between mother and daughters nodes that is called dominance, that is, syntactic hierarchy. The second is the selectional asymmetry between sister nodes, which is translated into the precedence relation in the phonological component. The third, called behindance, is an alternative to dominance, and corresponds to parataxis. Parenthesis, coordination, and apposition are analyzed on the basis of behindance. In our derivational model of grammar it is defined as a special type of inclusion that blocks c-command. It follows that parenthetic material can neither move toward the matrix, nor be bound by a constituent from the matrix.