How strict should cartography be? A view from slavic

This article addresses one of the core questions in syntactic theory - the architec-ture of the (universal) tree. The question is crucial when we consider the recent rise of strict syntactic Cartography (Rizzi 1997, Cinque 1999, Cinque & Rizzi 2010), a research program that seeks to map syntactic structure in as highly an atom-ized and universal a fashion as possible. In this article, I present two different ar-guments from Slavic syntax that the strictest current hypothesis about syntactic Cartography is insufficiently flexible to account for the various phenomena under consideration. In particular, I look at multiple WH-movement in Slavic, and the representation of Topic/Focus through word order and prosody. Both areas pose significant problems for strict Cartography. These case studies should be taken se-riously as important empirical tests for a theory that posits a fixed universal and extensive set of syntactic primitives with the additional restrictions imposed by considerations of anti-symmetry, such as single specifier positions and no free pro-cess of adjunction. In conclusion I discuss the appropriate place for Cartography in syntax, and its connection to syntactic features.