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SymposiumSunday, 6 JanuaryThe Privilege of the RootClarendon/Berkeley9:00 AM – 12:00 PMOrganizers:Participants:Liliane Haegeman (Ghent University)Shigeru Miyagawa (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)C.-T. James Huang (Harvard University)Liliane Haegeman (Ghent University)Shigeru Miyagawa (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)Luigi Rizzi (University of Siena)Barry C.-Y. Young (National United University)Raffaella Zanuttini (Yale University)If all structure is the output of merge, some instances of merge have to be restricted essentially to root domains. Emonds (1970)was the first to systematically note that phenomena such subject auxiliary inversion and argument fronting in English are limitedto the root (‘Root Transformations’ or ‘Main Clause Phenomena’). Emonds’ original work focused on the fact that RTs arebasically restricted to non-embedded domains. However, Hooper & Thompson (1973) show that Emonds’ RTs are permitted in arestricted set of embedded contexts.Though some of the original discussions of RT/MCP might give the impression that RTs/MCP constitute a homogenous class, adistinction has to be made between ‘root’ phenomena available in certain embedded domains and another group that aregenuinely restricted to root clauses. Among the non-embeddable MCPs, two types can readily be distinguished: one type appearsto encode the relation between the proposition and the discourse (participants), such as the encoding of allocutive agreement inSouletin Basque (Oyharçabal 1993, Miyagawa 2012). A second array consists of ‘left edge ellipsis’ phenomena (LEEP). LEEPtypically comprise topic drop phenomena as described for Chinese (Huang 1984), Portuguese (Raposo 1986), and German (Ross1982) in which the leftmost constituent of the root is deleted, and the deleted constituent is recoverable from the context. Theimperative clause type (with subject ellipsis) also falls into this category of LEEP.In what way is the root privileged in being able to host these phenomena? Recently Miyagawa (2012) has argued that a subset ofthe non-embeddable root phenomena depends on the availability of a structural layer dominating CP, which anchors theproposition to discourse context. When the relevant structural layer is unavailable, ‘strictly’ root phenomena are illicit. Thisproposal is reminiscent of Ross’ (1970) performative analysis, and of Banfield’s (1982) syntactic encoding of the Speech Event.Recent updates of the same hypotheses are found in Speas & Tenny 2003, Zanuttini 2008, Haegeman & Hill 2010, Sigurðsson2004, 2011, etc.For the embeddable MCP, semantic/pragmatic and syntactic accounts have been proposed. For Hooper and Thompson (1973) andresearchers adopting their approach (e.g., Green 1976, 1990, 1996, Krifka 2001, Sawada and Larson 2004), the distinctive factorthat characterizes embeddable MCP is ‘assertion’, a semantic/pragmatic condition (H&T 1973: 495). However, Heycock (2006)and Haegeman (2012) note that the precise identification of this semantic/pragmatic property remains elusive. Hooper andThompson’s (1973: 484-5) own finiteness requirement for MCP suggests that syntax plays a part. In view of this, there have beenattempts at a syntactic reinterpretation of Hooper and Thompson’s ‘assertion hypothesis’, associating the encoding of assertionwith a specific functional projection (‘ForceP’, Rizzi 1997) in the left periphery (cf. Bayer 2001, Julien 2008), which isunavailable in the domains that resist MCP (Emonds 2004, Haegeman 2003, Meinunger 2004, 2005; see also Basse 2008). Othersyntactic approaches propose that, in the contexts resisting MCP, a conflict arises between the syntactic properties of the MCPand those of the embedding clause (Emonds 1976, Iwakura 1978, Haegeman 2010).Abstracts:Shigeru Miyagawa (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)A typology of the root phenomenaThere are two types of ‘root’ phenomena that are conditioned by fundamentally different factors. The ‘root’ transformations thatEmonds (1969, 1976) originally identified, such as topicalization and negative constituent preposing, turn out to apply in anumber of non-root environments. Hooper and Thompson (1973), who originally showed the non-root nature of thesetransformations, argue for a semantic account, while Haegeman (e.g., 2010) argues for a syntactic account. In contrast to these117