Rowlett, PA 2007, 'The specifier–head relationship: negation and French subject proforms' , Transactions of the Philological Society, 105 (3) , pp. 339-364.

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Abstract

This article1 and the three others in this thematic collection are about heads and specifiers, the relationship between them, and how this relationship can change over time. A theme which emerges is the notion that the spec(ifier)–head relationship is cyclic, in other words, the synchronic relationship between the head and its specifier within a given phrase in a given language can be characterised as a location at a particular point on a cycle, while the diachronic development of the relationship can be seen as a directional stepwise shift around that cycle. The article is organised as follows. Section 2 introduces the theoretical framework. Section 3.1 sketches a well-known diachronic phenomenon – the history of sentential negation – which readily lends itself to an analysis in terms of a cyclic spec–head relationship, and shows how the stages in the cycle have been characterised theoretically. Section 3.2 considers another set of data − pre- and postverbal subject proforms in French − which is similarly suitable for such an approach. Section 4, finally, introduces the three other contributions to the collection.

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