Left-right (a)symmetries and movement in natural languages
Over the last several decades the inquiry into natural languages yielded (at least) two opposing views with respect to the symmetry of the underlying syntactic structure. In one approach, grammar is underlyingly symmetric in that it can output either specifier-final or specifier-initial orders, as well as either head-initial or head-final orders (cf. Chomsky 1986, among others). In this “symmetric” approach, the established preponderance of specifier-initial over specifier-final orders may follow from a ban on rightward movement, or even extra-grammatical principles such as sentence processing (Neeleman and Ackema 2002, Neeleman and Abels 2007). In the other “asymmetric” approach, all phrases are linearized in the specifier-head-complement (SHC) orders (cf. Kayne 1994); while surface patterns that appear to deviate from the SHC schema must be derived via a series of movements. Both approaches continue to face a number of empirical hurdles and the fundamental question of whether grammar is underlyingly symmetric or asymmetric remains unanswered. In this talk I discuss finer differences between the approaches and propose novel ways of determining the (a)symmetry of grammar, focusing on the surface asymmetry between subject-initial and subject-final languages and the so-called Final-Over-Final Constraint (cf. Biberauer et al. 2014), according to which head-final phrases cannot dominate head-initial phrases within the same extended projection.
