Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The Final-over-Final Condition (FOFC) (Sheehan, Biberauer, Roberts, and Holmberg 2017) purports to be a universal word order constraint.In this article, we challenge this claim and demonstrate that the FOFC is of a statistical nature: It is a relativized¸ non-absolute version of cross-categorial harmony, where only a head-final projection dominating a head-initial projection is ruled out among the disharmonic configurations displaying different head directionalities.The cross-categorial generalizations in the World Atlas of Languages, referred to by Sheehan et al. (2017) in order to illustrate the crosslinguistic validity of the FOFC, are shown to be useless for determining head-directionality, given that they systematically gloss over functional categories.The Mandarin Chinese head-final split CP dominating a uniformly head-initial extended verbal projection and TP serves as a case study here, because it has challenged the FOFC since its very beginning.The numerous efforts to make the Chinese CP "FOFC-compliant", the latest being Biberauer (2017), are shown to be unsuccessful and to ignore well-established principles of Chinese syntax.The data from Chinese thus add to the evidence from other languages likewise undermining the FOFC.* I would like to thank both reviewers for their constructive comments, which led to a much improved final version.1 BHR (2014: 170) explicitly take the FOFC "to be both a hierarchical and a cross-categorial universal".2 According to Reviewer 2, for example, the FOFC in Sheehan et al. (2017) is not meant to be a constraint itself; instead it is a set of constraints that leads to the FOFC pattern.S/he refers to Holmberg's chapter 4 in Sheehan et al. (2017) and to BHR (2014) for an account based on Kayne's (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA).Cf. section 4.1 below for problems with this account.Also cf.Leivada (2020) and Clem (2022) for a critical appraisal of the FOFC qua universal.
Source: Nordlyd
DOI: 10.7557/12.7972
Author: Waltraud Paul
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4405946541