Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammar and Related Formalisms, pages 153–158,
Sydney, July 2006. c©2006 Association for Computational Linguistics
‘Single Cycle’ Languages: Empirical Evidence for TAG-Adjoining
Arthur Stepanov
Institute of Linguistics
University of Potsdam
P.O. Box 601553, D-14415 Potsdam, Germany
artorius7@gmail.com
Abstract
Russian and Polish lack ’unbounded’
syntactic dependencies that fall into
the primary empirical domain of
TAG-Adjoining, namely, long-distance
movement/filler-gap dependencies across
a tensed clause boundary. A theory that
incorporates Adjoining as a recursive
structure building device provides a novel
and straightforward account of this gap,
whereas existing theories of syntactic
locality, e.g. of the standard Minimalist
kind, face difficulties explaining the phe-
nomenon. These languages thus supply
direct linguistic evidence for Adjoining.
1 Introduction
Frank (2002), elaborating on earlier work (Kroch,
1987) shows that incorporating TAG-Adjoining
into a theory of Universal Grammar of the Min-
imalist kind (Chomsky, 1995; Chomsky, 2000)
yields a number of important empirical advan-
tages. In particular, Adjoining provides a sim-
ple and elegant solution for the long-standing and
difficult problem in modern syntactic theory con-
cerning a proper formulation of the recursive, or
’successive-cyclic’, character of unbounded long
movement in examples such as (1) where the wh-
phrase stops by each intermediate CP (’Comp’).
(1) [CP Who1 does Peter think [CP t1 (that)
Mary saw t1]]?
According to Frank (2002), there is no long move-
ment per se in (1); rather, only a local wh-
movement takes place within the embedded clause
(2-a), and the matrix part (2-b) is later ‘interpo-
lated’ by Adjoining at the C’ node.
(2) a. [CP Who1 [C’ Mary saw t1]]
b. [C’ does Peter think]
Other long-distance dependencies, such as long
‘subject raising’ (e.g. John seems to be likely to be
smart) are treated along similar lines.
Long-distance dependencies (LDD) thus reduce
to local dependencies within an elementary tree
(in the sense of TAG) coupled with the recursive
mechanism of ’interpolating’ additional structural
chunk(s) by Adjoining. It follows that if the re-
cursive engine in the form of Adjoining were ren-
dered inoperative in some language, LDDs that are
built with Adjoining will not be possible in that
language. In this study, we investigate Russian and
Polish and argue that those are indeed languages
that meet that expectation.
2 Data
A systematization of the relevant data leads
to the following descriptive generalization:
movement/filler-gap dependencies of any kind
in Russian and Polish are strictly confined to a
single Tense domain, roughly, C(omplementizer)
P(hrase) in the standardly assumed clause
structure.
Consider first the case of A′-movement. It
is well known that Russian lacks standard long-
distance wh-movement out of finite (tensed)
clauses of the type in (1) (Comrie (1972), among
others). Russian also lacks other long-distance A’-
dependencies such as Topicalization (M¨uller and
Sternefeld, 1993). This is shown in (3).
(3) a. ?*Kogo
Whom-acc
ty
you
sˇcitaeˇs’
believe
ˇcto
that
Maˇsa
Masha
ljubit?
loves
153
b. ?*etu
this
knigu
book
Ivan
Ivan
sˇcitaet
believes
ˇcto
that
emu
him
dal
gave
Maksim
Maksim
Aside from finite clauses, wh-movement is possi-
ble out of control infinitival as well as out of sub-
junctive complements:
(4) Kogo
Whom
Ivan
Ivan
xoˇcet
wants
priglasit’
to-invite
na
to
veˇcerinku?
party
(5) Kogo
Whom
Ivan
Ivan
xotel
wanted
ˇctoby
that-sbj
my
we
priglasili?
invited
Control infinitivals in Russian have been inde-
pendently shown to be domains smaller than CP,
namely, VPs (Babby, 1998), unlike in English
where they are analyzed as either CPs or TPs, de-
pending on a theory.1 Subjunctive clauses present
a well known ’restructuring’ context. In many
languages, they trigger ’clause union’ and al-
low otherwise clause-bound processes, e.g. clitic
climbing. In Russian, subjunctive clauses display
the obviation effect with respect to Condition B
whereby the embedded subject must have a refer-
ence disjoint with that of the matrix subject, typi-
cal of a clause-bound process:
(6) *Ivani
Ivan
xoˇcet
wants
ˇctoby
that-subjnct
oni
he
uexal
left
Given this and other local effects, subjunctives
in Russian and other languages have been argued
to involve a ’domain extension’ process (not very
well understood in a derivational theory) collaps-
ing matrix and embedded clauses into a single
Tense domain ((Picallo, 1984; Progovac, 1993;
Terzi, 1992) among others).
The precise nature of the single Tense domain
restriction in Russian has remained largely un-
clear. A number of technical solutions were
proposed in the Government and Binding and
Minimalist frameworks in the form of various
constraints on extraction and additional barriers
(M¨uller, 1995; Zaenen, 1983; Pesetsky, 1982;
Stepanov, 2001; Koster, 1978). However, the
1Babby’s relevant argument draws on the assumption that
the silent PRO subject has null dative case in Russian. Thus
a contrastive reflexive doubling the PRO subject appears in
dative case in non-obligatory control sentences, but must ap-
pear in nominative in obligatory control cases. Babby argues
that the latter involves no PRO at all, just a bare VP.
question why Russian and Polish should differ
from English in this manner continues to be sub-
ject to much discussion.
LDDs are also missing in the context of so
called A-movement. Long subject raising is un-
available in Russian (even though predicates with
’raising’ semantics are available), unlike in Eng-
lish, cf. (7):2
(7) *Ivan
Ivan
kaˇzetsja
seems
byt’
to-be
bol’nym
sick
On the standard view in transformational theory
(Chomsky, 1981) both subject raising and ob-
ject raising, or Exceptional Case Marking (ECM),
cases are explained by the same principles. In this
respect, it is not surprising that Russian lacks in-
finitival ECM contexts as well (Brecht, 1974; Las-
nik, 1998):
(8) *Ivan
Ivan
sˇcitaet
considers
Mariju
Mary
byt’
to-be
umnoj
smart
Aspectual, or ‘phase’ verbs (begin, con-
tinue) have sometimes been argued to involve
long (cross-clausal) raising (Perlmutter, 1970).
A number of empirical diagnostics applied to
Russian clearly demonstrate the monoclausal (sin-
gle Tense) character of these constructions in this
language (Stepanov, 2006). For instance, assum-
ing that sentential adverbs such as possibly mod-
ify the Tense (TP) domain (Watanabe, 1993), in
a truly biclausal configuration a lower TP adverb
could in principle have a narrower scope with re-
spect to the matrix verb. However, with Russian
aspectuals the situation is different. In (9) na
sledujuˇsˇcej nedele necessarily modifies the entire
sentence, along with vozmoˇzno:
(9) On
He
vozmoˇzno
possibly
prodolˇzit
will-continue
na
on
sledujuˇsˇcej
next
nedele
week
ˇcitat’
to-read
knigu
book
Other potential candidates for cross-clausal LDD
in Russian such as epistemic modal constructions
have also been argued to involve a single Tense
domain (Schoorlemmer, 1994). In effect, the cur-
rent literature on Russian syntax reveals no clear
cases of LDD spanning more than one Tense do-
main, and those contexts that have been assumed
2The ‘small clause’ version of (7) (without byt’) is al-
lowed. Small clause sentences also involve a single Tense
domain (Stowell, 1981)
154
to do that (often on analogy with other languages),
on closer introspection show the single Tense be-
havior, such as those above.
A similar state of affairs was found in Pol-
ish, where the lack of LDD in the domain of A′-
movement out of finite clauses is well documented
(see (Giejgo, 1981; Zabrocki, 1981; Witkos, 1981)
for A′-movement cases, and (Zabrocki, 1981) for
A-movement cases).
One may entertain two analytical strategies in
handling the Russian/Polish facts. One is to look
for separate analyses of the lack of long A’- and
A-dependencies. We believe such an approach
would miss an important generalization concern-
ing the across-the-board character of local move-
ment dependencies in these languages. A more in-
triguing and fruitful possibility to explore is that
Russian and Polish only allow dependencies con-
fined, roughly speaking, to a single CP. We call
such languages ’single cycle’ languages, in con-
trast to the more familiar, ’successive cyclic’ lan-
guage type (English). The question to be ad-
dressed now is: what is responsible for the ’single
cycle’ property?
3 The traditional approach
The standard approach in transformational syntac-
tic theory since Chomsky (1965) and to this day
(Chomsky, 2001) maintains that syntactic move-
ment dependencies are a priori unconstrained by
the size of the structure over which they are
formed; in fact, in this approach there are no a pri-
ori restrictions on structure building at all. The
structure building operation ‘Merge’ applies re-
cursively until the material available for sentence
building (lexical items, previously built chunks of
structure) is exhausted. This approach has an in-
herent difficulty handling the Russian/Polish facts
since it is not clear what would prevent a depen-
dency to stretch as long as the size of the structure
permits, in some languages but not others.3 The
usual strategy in this case would be to impose ad-
ditional constraints on movement in ‘single cycle’
languages which do not apply in languages like
English. This may be satisfactory at some level of
analysis, but involves a real complication in this
theory. A more attractive possibility, we believe,
would be to have this constraint follow from the
3The controversy in formulating the ‘successive cyclic’
character of LDDs in English and other languages, mentioned
in Section 1 is part of that difficulty.
architecture of the theory itself. TAG provides just
the right platform to make this explicit.
4 A TAG solution
We explore the linguistic version of TAG in
Frank (2002) which bears close resemblance to the
mainstream Minimalist model. In this version of
TAG syntactic movement is naturally limited by
the size of maximal structural domains built by
Merge - elementary trees. Crucially, all movement
takes place within elementary trees, before these
trees are joined together into a complex structure
by designated operations - Substitution and Ad-
joining.4 The recursive character of LDDs (‘suc-
cessive cyclicity’) is seen in this system as a con-
sequence of recursion in structure building at par-
ticular structural nodes, such as C′ or T′ (in the
sense of X-bar theory). In particular, the recur-
sive aspect of LDD is captured via the structure
building operation Adjoining which interposes ad-
ditional structure in between the head and the tail
of a local dependency at a recursive node within a
given elementary tree (see Section 1).
Notably, in virtually all cases of LDDs consid-
ered in Frank’s study the additional structure op-
erated by Adjoining constituted a Tensed domain.
This approach suggests a natural direction to pur-
sue with respect to ‘single cycle’ languages that
can be summarized in (10):
(10) Proposal
TAG-Adjoining is inoperative in ‘single
cycle’ languages.
If Adjoining is unavailable, there is no way
to combine two elementary trees as in (2).
(10) straightforwardly accounts for the fact that
Russian and Polish feature neither A- nor A’-
LDD, that is, the type of constructions in which
recursive (‘successive cyclic’) movement is in-
volved. This proposal makes no recourse to addi-
tional theoretical constructs as the traditional ap-
proaches but makes use of the existing machinery
of TAG which provides a simple and accurate de-
scription of the phenomenon.
In effect, (10) implies that a source of paramet-
ric variation lies in the phrase structural compo-
nent, to which Adjoining naturally belongs. The
4Substitution connects the root node of one elementary
tree in an empty slot in another elementary tree, similarly
to a Generalized Transformation of Chomsky (1955/75) or
Chomsky (1995), Ch.3.
155
idea of phrase structure as a locus of paramet-
ric variation, and implications for child language
acquisition and learnability, have been explored
in detail in Lebeaux (1988/2000), a precursor to
standard Minimalism. We believe it is possible
to frame (10) in the general scheme of Lebeaux’s
parametric model.
5 Parametric and acquisitional aspects
Lebeaux (1988/2000) proposes that particular
grammars are hierarchically ordered by their com-
plexity: a grammar G0 that features operations O1
and O2 properly contain a grammar G1 that fea-
tures only O1. Considering the operations Adjoin-
α and Conjoin-α, Lebeaux represents the relevant
parametric space as in (11), where arrows are to be
read as addition of an operation to the grammar,
and parenthesis as ’invisibility’ for the learner.
(11) Adjoin-α Conjoin-α
G0 (( a45G1) a45G2)
Different parametric options correspond to dif-
ferent sets of erased parentheses (outermost first).
Furthermore, Lebeaux proposes that the paramet-
ric sequence (11) actually mirrors (in his terms, is
’congruent to’) the time course of children’s gram-
matical development. That is, in the course of lan-
guage development children proceed from less to
more computationally complex grammars, along
the lines of (11).
Frank (1998) takes up the developmental por-
tion of Lebeaux’s congruency thesis in the con-
text of TAG-Adjoining, suggesting that the de-
velopmental sequence for English speaking chil-
dren proceeds from the grammar without Adjoin-
ing to a grammar with Adjoining. Viewed in
this manner, the proposal explains, among other
things, why children learning English initially fail
to construe even simple cases of long-distance
wh-movement or subject to subject raising, while
performing well on constructions with similar
processing load that do not involve recursion.
Representing Frank’s proposal with Lebeaux type
notation may look as in (12) (Merge and Move op-
erate within an elementary tree; cf. above).
(12) Adjoining
...G1Move,Merge a45 G2
In the context of Lebeaux’s congruency thesis,
Frank’s proposal begs a question as to whether
there exist a parametric sequence that corresponds
to the proposed developmental sequence. Frank
does not attempt an answer. But now we are able
to fill in this gap. Specifically, we now say that,
indeed, the parametric sequence includes a com-
putationally more complex grammar with Adjoin-
ing which properly contains the grammar without
Adjoining, as represented in (13).
(13) Adjoining
...G1Move,Merge( a45 G2)
Here, one parametric option is G1 (no parentheses
erased) corresponding to ’single cycle’ languages
like Russian and Polish. The option erasing the
parentheses in (13) results in languages with usual
recursive LDDs (English etc). This is exactly as
expected under the Congruency thesis. ‘Single cy-
cle’ languages thus provide strong evidence for 1)
the TAG operation Adjoining; 2) Lebeaux’s con-
gruency thesis; and 3) Frank’s acquisitional se-
quence with respect to Adjoining.
6 Refining Adjoining
Auxiliary trees, utilized by Adjoining, come in
two varieties, both of which adhere to a princi-
pal requirement: the ‘root’ and ‘foot’ node of such
tree must be categorically identical (e.g. CP), in
order for Adjoining to succeed. In one variety
the root node directly dominates the foot node
(14-a). This case corresponds to standard transfor-
mational adjunction. In the second variety there is
structural material between the root and the foot
nodes (14-b):
(14) a) A
A X
b) A
X
A
The recursive structures we are interested in in-
volve only the ’interpolation’ variety in (14-b).
But (10) refers to the prohibition of Adjoining
in general. That is, in the present form it is
too powerful: it rules out not only ’interpolated’
cases of Adjoining, but also regular cases of base-
generated adjunction, e.g. VP or DP modifiers
(adverbs or adjectives).
One direction that one might undertake in this
regard is to relax (10) and allow Adjoining for
particular nodes in Russian, while excluding it for
others. This amounts, essentially, to specifying the
list of recursive nodes for grammars of particular
156
languages. In this manner, we automatically con-
strain the types of possible auxiliary trees, targeted
by Adjoining. Such lists are commonly used in
various formal versions of TAG (cf. (Abeill´e and
Rambow, 2000)). Our parametric variation could
then be captured for instance as follows:
(15) English: Aux = {TP, CP, VP, DP}
Russian: Aux = {VP, DP}
Another, more interesting alternative, is to make
a principled distinction between the two cases of
Adjoining. In fact, there is a well established
linguistically sound method of distinguishing the
types of root and foot nodes in (14)a and (14)b.
The method goes back to structural distinction be-
tween segments and full categories, along the lines
of Chomsky (1986) (who, in turn, builds on the
work of R. May). Namely, both nodes labeled A
in (14)a are in fact segments of a single category
A. In contrast, the nodes labeled A in (14)b are full
categories (note that the ’listing’ solution above
ignores this state of affairs). It seems appropri-
ate, therefore, to split Adjoining into two different
operations, e.g. Adjunction (which coincides with
the traditional transformational usage) for (14)a,
and Interpolation for the case (14)a. The proposal
in (10) then pertains to the latter, without loss of
generality. Details of this alternative are discussed
in Stepanov (2006).
7 Further issues
The proposal explored in (10) does not imply that
the recursive component is completely excluded
in ‘single cycle’ languages. Declarative sentences
with one or more embedded tensed clauses are
of course available. In the linguistic version of
TAG adopted here, those are built by Substitution
- at the CP node (for details, see Frank (2002).
Furthermore, wh-extraction facts concerning con-
trol infinitivals and subjunctives and Russian and
Polish suggest that certain recursive structural do-
mains (e.g. VPs in control infinitivals) are built
by Merge within a single elementary tree, and
therefore, that not all prima facie LDDs are ex-
clusively handled with Adjoining, in contrast to
Frank (2002). In particular, Adjoining is re-
sponsible only for LDDs that involve more than
one Tense domain, while all others are built with
Merge within a single elementary tree, and are not,
strictly speaking, LDDs at all as they do not dis-
play the ‘successive cyclic’ character.
This raises two further issues. One issue con-
cerns a possible need to slightly modify the crite-
ria of well-formedness of elementary trees formed
by Merge as discussed by Frank (2002) to allow
the above contexts. Another issue concerns mak-
ing more precise the proper division of labor with
respect to two types of LDDs. In a system such
as Frank (2002) the distinction can be captured
in terms of selectional restrictions, perhaps of se-
mantic kind. Selection usually plays a crucial role
in forming an elementary tree by Merge: in most
recent transformational theories, selection directly
determines a candidate for Merge. On the other
hand, it is conceivable to suppose that Adjoining -
the operation that interpolates one elementary tree
into another after both have already been built by
Merge - has little to do with selection. Therefore,
dependencies that are formed via selection in di-
rect or indirect manner, cannot be relegated to Ad-
joining. Further aspects of this suggestion remain
to be explored.
8 Conclusion
Integration of TAG mechanisms into the main-
stream linguistic theory leads to a significant
widening of its empirical coverage in various do-
mains. As shown in previous work, a major
strength of the TAG formalism lies in its great
potential to capture facts concerning strict local-
ity of syntactic dependencies in natural language.
The present study applies the TAG machinery in
the domain of well known but ill explained phe-
nomenon of radical across-the-board locality of
syntactic dependencies in two Slavic languages,
Russian and Polish. We have shown that making
use of the TAG operation Adjoining leads to a sim-
ple and straightforward account of this phenom-
enon, while the standard (pre-)Minimalist model
of syntax faces conceptual difficulties in this re-
gard. We also provided independent support for
the thesis of congruency of the parametric and ac-
quisitional sequences with respect to Adjoining
(Lebeaux, 1988/2000; Frank, 1998) and suggested
ways of refining Adjoining in light of the new em-
pirical data.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Robert Frank, Jens Michaelis,
Penka Stateva and three anonymous referees for
helpful suggestions.
157

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