Refining the Borer-Chomsky Conjecture: Redundancy and Deficiency

Abstract

The standard view on the nature of parametric variation has been the Borer-Chomsky Conjecture (BCC): the notion that parametric variation reduces to (a subset of) formal features of (a subset of) functional heads. However, while we have a reasonable extensional idea of what such formal features are (e.g. Person, Number, Case, Tense, Aspect, Mood, wh, D, Q, …), though such lists are always incomplete, we have no adequate intensional definition to date. A particular consequence of this is that it undermines the BCC, since without such a definition, strictly speaking no predictions can be made about the limits to typological variation. In this article, we propose an alternative to the BCC, which relies on the notions of Redundancy and Deficiency. This alternative provides the desired intensional definition of the central notion of formal feature which, we contend, remedies the shortcomings of the BCC, leading to a new conjecture concerning the nature of variation. We argue that our approach is both empirically more adequate and conceptually superior.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Catalan Journal of Linguistics, 2026 · DOI ↗