Re: X-Bar Theory

On Thu, 25 Jul 2002, julien eychenne wrote:

> All sentences, in every languages, are supposed to be headed by a C''
> node, where C is a position for complementizer (Comp). It is very
> abstract, and not that much interesting, but thanks to that node we can
> have relative and subordinate structures (this really much complex).
One current popular view of the C projection is that it contains the
illocutionary force of the sentence. In a declarative sentence in English,
we would have a "silent morpheme" (basically just an abstract description)
that heads the CP, which imparts the information that the sentence is
declarative. If the sentence were interrogative, the head of CP would
contain a question morpheme, such as the _-ka_ suffix in Japanese or _ma_
in Chinese.

(Actually, more current work, especially by Luigi Rizzi and his students,
is suggesting that what has been called CP for all these years should be
divided up into more like five projections, including: Topic, Focus, Force
(ie illocutionary force), and Finiteness.)

Marcus