Agreeing and Moving across Traces: On Why Lower Copies May Be Transparent or Opaque

Within Minimalism, traces are often taken to be transparent for agreement and movement across them, which raises the question of how this could be properly accounted for within the copy theory of movement. This paper examines wh-traces in multiple wh-questions and argues that traces (lower copies) may or may not induce intervention effects depending on whether or not they are fully specified.

Predicate doubling by phonological copying

In this paper, I argue for an approach to copy constructions in syntax that does not rely on the copy theory of movement; rather, it employs copy operations as in standard cases of reduplication. As a case study, I consider predicate doubling constructions in (two varieties of) German, Hebrew, and Asante Twi. I argue that the choice between copying and do support in predicate doubling constructions can be reduced to the order of the two operations Move and Copy. The analysis relies on the assumption that predicate fronting in German must involve VPs (and cannot involve bare Vs); in an appendix, I provide independent evidence for this.

Binding reconstruction and two modes of copy-chain interpretation

We present a theory for the interpretation of Ā-movement chains at LF in the copy theory of movement where the NP restrictor of a DP Ā-movement chain is interpreted in only one copy. Such a view is motivated for English by evidence from reflexive binding, building on observations in Barss 1986, and its interaction with parasitic gap licensing and weak crossover effects. Our approach offers a means for understanding the classification of Ā-movement types in Cinque 1990 and Postal 1994 in copy-theoretic terms.

The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Xici and Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

This paper, unlike scholars who ascribe to it a copy theory of meaning, argues that the logic of the Xici is best described through “philosophy’s linguistic turn,” specifically Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms. Cassirer’s concept of the symbol as a pluralistic, constitutive, and functional yet concrete and observable form, is comparable to the symbolic system in the Xici 系辭: xiang 象, gua 卦, yao 爻, and yi 易. Their similarity is due to a shared philosophical orientation: humanism. The characteristics of the Xici—the part-whole (structuralist) relationship typical of correlative cosmology, the simultaneously sensuous and conceptual nature of its symbols, the stress on order as opposed to unity, and the importance of symbols per se—for Cassirer are characteristics that were only possible in European intellectual history after a substance ontology was replaced by a functional one. For Cassirer, a functional ontology is closely associated with a humanism that celebrates creations (i.e., language) of the human mind in determining reality. This humanism is coherent with the intellectual context—Confucian humanism—contemporary with the period of the Xici’s composition. It would thus be inconsistent to concede this humanism to the Xici without also conceding that its understanding of the symbols is akin to that of the linguistic turn. Finally, even regardless of this comparative framework, the Xici runs into a paradox if we read it through a copy theory of meaning, paradoxes that immediately dissolve if we read it through the paradigm of the linguistic turn.

Lower and Higher Copies in Arabic

This paper examines the phenomenon of copying in Standard Arabic (SA) within the copy theory. Following Boskovic and Nunes (2007), the researcher contends that Arabic utilizes two ways for the pronunciation of heads and copies governed by syntactic and phonological constraints. The highest link can be phonetically realized, or copies are pronounced instead of their heads by PLC without causing the derivation to crash. The paper shows how the copy theory accounts for the differences between perfective and imperative forms on one hand and the imperfective form on the other hand. The copy theory helps account for V-to-T0 movement in imperatives and perfectives in comparison with remaining in lower projections in imperfectives. Further, the research reveals that certain fixed word orders in Arabic can be accounted for in terms of the copy theory. The type of the object DP plays a role in which copy is realized, and hence affects word order. The higher copy of the object DP is pronounced when it is an enclitic object pronoun, while the lower copy is pronounced when the object is an R-expression DP. Addressing the topic of copying from a semantics-syntax interface perspective, the paper explains the bearings of copy operations on syntax.

Pragmatism

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition founded by three American philosophers: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey. Starting from Alexander Bain’s definition of belief as a rule or habit of action, Peirce argued that the function of inquiry is not to represent reality, but rather to enable us to act more effectively. He was critical of the ‘copy theory’ of knowledge which had dominated philosophy since the time of Descartes, and especially of the idea of immediate, intuitive self-knowledge. He was also a prophet of the linguistic turn, one of the first philosophers to say that the ability to use signs is essential to thought. Peirce’s use of Bain was extended by James, whose The Principles of Psychology (1890) broke with the associationism of Locke and Hume. James went on, in Pragmatism (1907) to scandalize philosophers by saying that ‘"The true"... is only the expedient in our way of thinking’. James and Dewey both wanted to reconcile philosophy with Darwin by making human beings’ pursuit of the true and the good continuous with the activities of the lower animals - cultural evolution with biological evolution. Dewey criticized the Cartesian notion of the self as a substance which existed prior to language and acculturation, and substituted an account of the self as a product of social practices (an account developed further by George Herbert Mead). Dewey, whose primary interests were in cultural, educational and political reform rather than in specifically philosophical problems (problems which he thought usually needed to be dissolved rather than solved), developed the implications of pragmatism for ethics and social philosophy. His ideas were central to American intellectual life throughout the first half of the twentieth century. All three of the founding pragmatists combined a naturalistic, Darwinian view of human beings with a deep distrust of the problems which philosophy had inherited from Descartes, Hume and Kant. They hoped to save philosophy from metaphysical idealism, but also to save moral and religious ideals from empiricist or positivist scepticism. Their naturalism has been combined with an anti-foundationalist, holist account of meaning by Willard van Orman Quine, Hilary Putnam and Donald Davidson - philosophers of language who are often seen as belonging to the pragmatist tradition. That tradition also has affinities with the work of Thomas Kuhn and the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Focus association into copies and the scope of even

Nakanishi 2012 presents a novel argument for the so-called “scope theory” of English VP-even, based on examples with antecedent-contained deletion (ACD). Nakanishi’s argument is based on the assumption that even cannot associate with a focus which has moved out of its scope. I show that this assumption is incorrect, defusing Nakanishi’s argument. I propose that when even associates with a focus which has moved out of its scope, it actually associates with focused material in the lower copies of movement (trace positions). I show that a closer look at ACD examples of Nakanishi’s type in fact forms a new argument against the scope theory. I conclude that English VP-even must always be interpreted in its pronounced position. The patterns of focus association with even presented here constitute a new argument for the copy theory of movement.