Antisymmetry

This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. Please help improve it to make it understandable to non-experts, without removing the technical details. (August 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

In linguistics, antisymmetry is a syntactic theory presented in Richard S. Kayne's 1994 monograph The Antisymmetry of Syntax.^[1] It asserts that grammatical hierarchies in natural language follow a universal order, namely specifier-head-complement branching order. The theory builds on the foundation of the X-bar theory. Kayne hypothesizes that all phrases whose surface order is not specifier-head-complement have undergone syntactic movements that disrupt this underlying order. Others have posited specifier-complement-head as the basic word order.^[2]

Antisymmetry as a principle of word order is reliant on X-bar notions such as specifier and complement, and the existence of order-altering mechanisms such as movement. It is disputed by constituency structure theories (as opposed to dependency structure theories).^{[citation needed]}