SKETCH OF A REDUCTIONIST APPROACH TO SYNTACTIC VARIATION AND DEPENDENCIES Dominique Sportiche to appear in Evolution and Revolution in Linguistic Theory UCLA

I begin by outlining some restrictive conditions on linguistic variation. I programmatically suggest that syntactic structure is completely invariant and that variation is strictly limited to morphophonological properties of (functional) heads. With this background, I explore a strongly reductionist program according to which syntactic properties are licensed by one of two mechanisms: spec/head licensing and incorporation. If necessary, these licensing configurations are arrived at by movement. The case of incorporation licensing subsumes head government and applies to strictly local relationships. The case of Spec/head applies to all other syntactic relationships involving c-command such as scope (wh-dependencies, quantifier scope, negative quantifiers, polarity quantifiers), clause typing and polarity (question/statement, affirmation/negation), focus constructions, clitic constructions, all anaphoric binding relations, Case assignment, theta assignment... The general idea is that each of these construction involves a particular property (Case, Theta, Wh-question, Scope of various kinds, Focus...) that we treat as a polarity property licensed in the specifier position of a designated licensing head. In other words, polarity items proper, or the current conception of wh-movement as a privileged relation to [spec,CP] with an appropriate content for C, are paradigmatic of all these syntactic dependencies: each (natural class of lexical) property is uniquely licensed in the specifier position of a particular head for that property. Licensing this property will (in general) require movement to a specific landing site, namely the specifier of the appropriate licensing head. * Various parts of this work have been presented at the 1992 GLOW Colloquium in Lisbon, the university of Indiana in Bloomington, Cornell University, the European Science Foundation conference in Strasbourg and in graduate seminars at UCLA in 1990, 1991, 1992 and 1993. Thanks to their audiences for their inputs. A grant from the UCLA Academic Senate partially supporting this research is gratefully acknowledged.