Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

1994), has produced a degree of compatibility with certain schools of functionalism such
as Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin 1993).
The fact that the text-artifactual record of any particular archaeologically recovered
language is necessarily quite limited and of inconsistent quality would seem to require
that highly predictive linguistic theories take the lead role. The two theories that have
most influenced the hypotheses and argumentation in this dissertation are (i) Role and
Reference Grammar and in particular work on case-marking and clause-linkage by
Silverstein (1976; 1993a) and Agha (1993) and (ii) recent formalist work carried out on
the basis of Kayne’s antisymmetry (1994) and, in particular, the generative literature on
so-called “double object” constructions, culminating—at least for the time being—in
Pylkkänen’s recent dissertation (2002) on low applicative constructions. My own
theoretical orientation remains structural-functionalist and those functionalist theories
that continue to make use of formal diagnostics for distributional classes are, in my view,
the most trustworthy. But the vast majority of recent research on the several topics that
this dissertation is about have been carried out almost entirely within generative
linguistics, notably investigators working within Distributed Morphology (see Marantz
1998 for orientation) and those investigating the right periphery—the region below, for
example, 31 AspSingCompletive1 in Cinque’s cartography (Cinque 1999)—and its
association with lexical aspect and quantization (Tenny 2000; Filip 2000). Although
Pylkkänen’s work and theoretical works by a few others are discussed from time to time
in this dissertation, the formal representations that have taken on such importance in
syntactic investigation in the past few decades have been eschewed.
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