Mapping Functional Structure: A Project
Guglielmo Cinque · 2002
Abstract This volume presents the first results of a long-term research project aiming at the discovery and mapping out of the functional structure of natural language sentences. The impetus of the study of functional structure, after Chomsky (1986, 3) first suggested extending the X-bar format to the nonlexical categories of Inflection and Complementizer, can be traced back to some fifteen years ago, with Abney (1987) for the DP, and Pollock (1989) for the sentence, with subsequent modifications by Belletti (1990), Ouhalla (1991), and Chomsky (1993), among others. Since then, the amount of work produced in the study of functional structure on a variety of languages, has grown to such an extent that a systematic mapping of the various functional heads found in the sentence and other phrases of the languages of the world has become appropriate, if not imperative. The idea is that we are at a point when it is finally possible to set the question in a systematic and empirical fashion, by having the various types of evidence considered in the literature interact and converge onto distinct functional hierarchies for each phrase.