Antisymmetry
Syntactic theory in linguistics / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Antisymmetry?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
In linguistics, antisymmetry is a syntactic theory presented in Richard S. Kayne's 1994 monograph The Antisymmetry of Syntax.[1] It asserts that grammatical hierarchies in natural language follow a universal order, namely specifier-head-complement branching order. The theory builds on the foundation of the X-bar theory. Kayne hypothesizes that all phrases whose surface order is not specifier-head-complement have undergone syntactic movements that disrupt this underlying order. Others have posited specifier-complement-head as the basic word order.[2]
This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. (August 2021) |
Antisymmetry as a principle of word order is reliant on X-bar notions such as specifier and complement, and the existence of order-altering mechanisms such as movement. It is disputed by constituency structure theories (as opposed to dependency structure theories).[citation needed]