Why Are There No Directionality Parameters?

Abstract

The human language faculty is antisymmetric, with consistent and exceptionless specifier–head–complement order, in part because probe–goal search shares the left-to-right directionality of production and parsing and in part because the merger of two phrases is unavailable. Many of the empirical arguments for antisymmetry involve cross-linguistic syntactic variation and thereby illustrate how such variation serves as a window on the principles of the language faculty.

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