Cross-category harmony, X-bar and the predictions of markedness

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Abstract
In a recent paper in this journal, Hawkins (1980), it was observed that there was considerable, but quite principled, variation both in the types and in the quantities of word order co-occurrences found in Greenberg's (1966) data (cf. his Appendix I (AI) and Appendix II (AII), reproduced here as Tables 1 and 2 respectively). We formulated two types of universal statements to account for this data: implicational universals, which define permitted versus non-permitted co-occurrences of word orders (matching the attested versus non-attested co-occurrences respectively), and which are of the form ‘if a language has some property (or properties) P, then it will also have some property (or properties) Q’; and a ‘universal of language distribution’, entitled the principle of ‘Cross-Category Harmony’ (CCH), which predicts the different quantities of languages having the permitted co-occurences.2 The present paper is intended as a sequel to the last. We now relate our universals to the cross-category, X-bar, generalizations of generative grammar and to issues of markedness, suggesting that our universals and X-bar theory can be of mutual benefit to one another.

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