Linguistic Analysis Information

Linguistic Analysis will next publish a special issue on Functional Categories. This special issue will assemble current theoretical and experimental studies on functional categories. The papers will address the role of functional elements in syntactic derivations, their interpretation at the interfaces, their incidence in linguistic variation, their early comprehension by the child, and their impoverishment in language disorder. The papers will challenge the traditional divide between lexical and functional categories, and will offer new insights on the role of functional elements for both conceptual interpretation and externalization of linguistic expressions. Challenges to the parallelism between DP and CP will be addressed and dismissed. The hypothesis that syntactic heads are perhaps always functional is brought forward from an antisymmetric perspective. The properties of high functional categories, such as speaker-oriented evaluative heads, and their externalization at the sensorimotor interface will be shown to be relevant beyond narrow syntax. The role of functional features in cross-modular syntax-phonology approaches to language variation will be elaborated. Results from language acquisition and language disorder studies will point to the centrality of the extended functional structure in language change.