Cartography and Explanatory Adequacy

Abstract This collection of papers aims to contribute to the empirical, conceptual, and meta-theoretical discussion of the merits and drawbacks of the cartographic program in linguistic theory. Although cartography has its roots in Rizzi’s (1997) the study of the left periphery, its empirical perimeter has expanded significantly over the years, now covering a wide variety of empirical domains such as argument structure, modification, and constituent order. The hallmark of most (if not all) cartographic studies is the assumption that there is a rich array of functional projections whose hierarchical order is fixed and determined by Universal Grammar (UG). The goal of this volume is to explore and question this programmatic assumption. The contributions discuss the nature of cartographic hierarchies with an eye to the central conceptual goal of explanatory adequacy: are the hierarchies an irreducible property of UG (hence constituting part of the “residue” beyond the scope of principled explanation), or are they emergent, deriving from independent principles that do not require a further enrichment of UG?