Deriving the Functional Hierarchy

Ramchand and Svenonius derive the coarse part of the functional hierarchy from three sorts of description: events, situations, which add time and world parameters to an event, and propositions, which anchor a situation to the utterance (§3). A head takes a description of one sort and yields one of the same or a higher sort (Compositional Coherence, (29)): the heads of the V-domain map events to events, Asp* events to situations, the heads of the T-domain situations to situations, and Fin* situations to propositions. Along any spine the sorts therefore rise, so a head that needs a higher sort sits above one that needs a lower: the perfect, a situation head, above the progressive, an event head (3); an English modal, which includes Fin*, above the perfect (§2.2); an epistemic modal above a root modal and above the perfect, (20), (23), (24); and situation above event adverbs (51). Within a zone the sorts fix no order, so a root modal and the perfect compose in either order, (21) and §6. Adverbs under passive been, as in (54), are event modifiers, and with already a situation modifier (51) no assignment of the zones to Cinque's heads is monotone, since Cinque puts the volitional head of intentionally above anterior tense.

Implementation notes

• A head is the sorts of its denotation in §4. Selection beyond sort, the progressive's dynamic complement (41) and the passive's argument structure (40), is not modelled, so (3c) and (3d), which the paper does not derive from sorts, are not rows; nor is the ordering within the event zone, so (3a) omits V-INIT, as §4.1 says the passive requires.
• The paper locates tense twice: in the T-domain below Fin* in (1) and (36), and on Fin* itself in (48). (3a) follows (36); the other spines put finite tense on Fin*. Where the paper names no Asp* for a form, the simple past and the infinitive, a spine has an unnamed Asp*, and a lexical verb with no decomposition is an eventuality description (26).
• Probably modifies situations, as §5.4 has it for (60), so (60b) composes and its star is the pragmatic one §5.4 assigns it. An adverb here modifies one sort; easily (58), which §5.3 lets modify either of two, is not a row.

Errata

• §5.1 puts epistemic adverbials above anything that modifies the situation, where §5.4 puts probably among the situation modifiers; with the former, the acceptable (61) would not compose (composes_61_iff).
• §4.1 says the passive head prevents the merge of V-INIT, yet the trees (1) and (36), the head movement of §1 and the strict order of §4.1 put V-INIT above V-PASS in passives.

TODO

• Wiltschko's fourth zone, point of view, between the event and the situation, which §3 declines.

References

• Ramchand & Svenonius 2014, Deriving the Functional Hierarchy
• Cinque 1999, Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective formalized
• Wiltschko 2014, The Universal Structure of Categories: Towards a Formal Typology