Luigi Burzio

Luigi Burzio is Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Science at the Johns Hopkins University.

Burzio's work from the early 1980s was devoted to the study of the argument structure of verbs, and helped establish the hypothesis known as the "Unaccusative Hypothesis", that the apparent subject of certain verbs (like fall, exist) is in fact the object in argument structure. That work shed light on the patterns of case marking and auxiliary selection in some of the Romance languages. One of the factual observations made in that work became known in linguistics as "Burzio's Generalization" [publ. 1-2].

In work of the mid-1980s and 1990's Burzio studied the principles controlling the expression of pronominal co-reference ("anaphora"), first influentially formulated by N. Chomsky (1981). Burzio argued that in choosing an element to express co-reference, options are effectively organized according to the hierarchy: reflexive > non-reflexive pronoun > name. This hierarchy reflects a principle of economy of referential expression, as reflexives lack any independent reference, while names have full independent reference and pronouns lie in between. In a structure like John saw himself/ *him, this principle will impose the reflexive pronoun (the referentially most parsimonious), excluding the non-reflexive pronoun him (when read as co-referential with John). The same principle will also impose the (more parsimonious) pronoun him in He thought that Mary saw him/ *John, hence excluding the name John (when read as co-referential with he).

Other principles sensitive to the structural distance between a pronominal and its antecedent will sometimes independently exclude the reflexive option, as in the last example, where himself would be barred, hence inducing selection of the non-reflexive pronoun --the next best choice.

Beside the above hierarchy, the work in question identifies several other hierarchies which appear to hold cross-linguistically. These concern the structural distance just alluded to; the conditions under which reflexives can felicitously agree with their antecedents; the prominence of different types of antecedents; and how the morphological "weight" of reflexives correlates with semantic biases. This approach foreshadows the application of the "Optimality Theory" of Prince and Smolensky (1993), (see below) in the domain of syntax [publ. 3-5].

In the early and mid 1990s Burzio’s work turned to phonology and word structure (morphology). In Principles of English Stress (1994), Burzio offers radically new solutions to a number of traditional problems of English morpho-phonology, such as vowel length allomorphy, as in divi:ne/ divinity; obli:ge/ obligatory; genera:te/ generative, fi:ni:te/ infinite; Elizabeth/ elizabe:than (where colons mark long or diphthongized vowels), and the distinction between re-stressing and non-restressing suffixes, as in párent/ parént-al (re-stressing) versus américan/ américan-ist (same stress). Those solutions rely on a constraint-based approach to morpho-phonology which has subsequently converged with the noted "Optimality Theory" of Prince and Smolensky (1993) [publ. 6-9].

In later work, from the early 2000's, Burzio introduced the hypothesis that mental representations are themselves constraint-based mini-grammars, able to influence other representations directly; specifically, that representations are set of conditionals or entailments ("Representational Entailments Hypothesis"), so that for instance a representation consisting of components A, B, C instantiates of all the logical entailments between components (if A then B; if B then A, etc.). This view mirrors what is known in Neuroscience as "Hebbian learning" (D. Hebb, 1949), the entailments standing for the synaptic connections that develop between neurons that are co-active, according to Hebb. It also corresponds to the architecture of a simple artificial neural network known as "Hopfield Network" (after J.J. Hopfield, 1982). It is easy to show that, on this hypothesis, each representation becomes effectively an "attractor" to neighboring representations and that greater harmony or stability can be achieved by either collapsing neighboring representations together or by introducing greater distance between them. If correct, this perspective stands to shed new light on critical areas in both phonology and morphology, from the structure of phonemic inventories, to assimilatory and dissimilatory processes, to "Derived Environments" effects, to morphological syncretism [publ. 10-14].

Cited References

• Chomsky, N. (1981) Lectures on Government and Binding.
    Foris, Dordrecht.
• Hebb, D. O. (1949) The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory.
    John Wiley and Sons.
• Hopfield, J.J. (1982) 'Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities'.
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 79, 2554- 2558.
• Prince, A., and P. Smolensky (1993) Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar.
    Report no. RuCCS-TR-2. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science. Published (2004): Blackwell.

Burzio’s Selected Publications

1. 1981: Intransitive Verbs and Italian Auxiliaries. Ph.D. Dissertation, distributed by MIT Working Papers in Linguistics: mitwpl@mit.edu.
2. 1986: Italian Syntax: A Government-Binding Approach, Reidel, Dordrecht (xiii+468 pp.).
3. 1991: 'The Morphological Basis of Anaphora'. Journal of Linguistics 27.1, 1-60.
4. 1996: 'The Role of the Antecedent in Anaphoric Relations', in R. Freidin, ed. Current Issues in Comparative Grammar, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1-45.
5. 1998: 'Anaphora and Soft Constraints', in Pilar Barbosa, Danny Fox, Paul Hagstrom, Martha McGinnis, and David Pesetsky, eds. Is the Best Good Enough? Optimality and Competition in Syntax MIT Press and MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.
6. 1993: 'English Stress, Vowel Length and Modularity'. Journal of Linguistics, 29.2, 359-418.
7. 1994: Principles of English Stress, Cambridge University Press.
8. 1996: 'Surface Constraints versus Underlying Representation', in: Durand, Jacques and Bernard Laks (eds.) Current Trends in Phonology: Models and Methods. European Studies Research Institute, University of Salford Publications. (123-141)
9. 1998: 'Multiple Correspondence'. Lingua 103, 79-109.
10. 2000: 'Cycles, Non-Derived-Environment Blocking, and Correspondence'. in Joost Dekkers, Frank van der Leeuw and Jeroen van de Weijer, eds. Optimality Theory: Phonology, Syntax, and Acquisition. Oxford University Press, 47-87.
11. 2002: 'Surface-to-Surface Morphology: when your Representations turn into Constraints', in P. Boucher (ed.) Many Morphologies, Cascadilla Press.
12. 2002: 'Missing Players: Phonology and the Past-tense Debate'. Lingua 112, 157-199.
13. 2005: 'Sources of Paradigm Uniformity', in Laura J. Downing, T. A. Hall, Renate Raffelsiefen, eds. Paradigms in Phonological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 65-106.
14. 2007: Wayment, Adam, Luigi Burzio, Donald Mathis, Robert Frank 'Harmony versus Distance in Phonetic Enhancement', in Emily Elfner and Martin Walkow (eds), Proceedings of NELS 37. GLSA Publications, Amherst. MA.

Burzio’s On-line Papers

• New: English Tri-syllabic Shortening: Some reflections (2025) lingbuzz/008929
• Constraint Violability and the Chain Condition (2010) lingbuzz/008934
• The Anaphoric and Pronominal System of Italian (2010) lingbuzz/008995
• Lexicon and Grammar: unequal but inseparable (2007) lingbuzz/008931