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Towards an Optimal Account of Second Position Phenomena

One of the early classics in generative grammar, published in the same year as Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures, was a paper by Morris Halle (1957) “In Defense of the Number Two.” The present paper might be seen as a further attempt to substantiate the linguistic significance of “two,” this time in the ordinal sense of “second” rather than that of binarity. A variety of recent analyses have attempted to claim, in effect, that the appearance of a notion of ‘second position’ in the descriptive statement of several natural language regularities is actually an artifact, that the real generalizations in each case refer to something else, and that the connection with second position is coincidental. I will argue, in contrast, that a number of effects are indeed related in a fundamental and unitary way to the notion of second position. The most appropriate way to capture these regularities appears to be in terms of a system of interacting constraints of the type envisioned in Optimality Theory, referring to the organization of a “postSpell Out” level of syntactic structure such as PF. In the syntactic literature of the past hundred years and more, there are two principal places where the notion of ‘second position’ seems to figure. Although the phenomena in question are at least superficially rather heterogeneous, one’s curiosity is naturally aroused as to whether there might