The basic assumption of Cartographic syntax is that syntactic structures are built according to the same patterns in all languages of the world.
It is assumed that all languages exhibit a richly articulated structure of hierarchical projections with specific meanings.
The Cartographic approach was developed with “the emergence of syntactic analyses that identified and implied functional heads” in the literature of the 1980’s.
[3] In the work of Guglielmo Cinque from 1999 the cartographic method was used to create a detailed map of the structure of a clause.
In this book Cinque proposes a “fixed universal hierarchy of clausal functional projections”.
Moreover, after a large cross linguistic analysis one of the observations was that adverbs from seemingly different classes have a fixed order across languages.
[8] The cartographic method is intended as a heuristic model which can lead to new empirical claims and generalizations.
It is assumed that even though some languages express or encode grammatical features in a visible way while others do not, the underlying functional sequence would be the same.
It is also assumed that variability in the order of the functional elements could be explained by movement operations triggered by other influences (for example information structure or scope).
[6] With the assumption that there is a one-to-one relationship between a syntactic feature and a head, within a hierarchy of functional categories every morphosyntactic feature (covertly or overtly realized) belonging to a functional element would be assigned a head with a fixed order in the hierarchy.
For example, in Cinque 1999 it has been shown that some functional categories such as NegP (Negation) and AgrP (Agreement) can have different positions.
However, an adjunct approach explicitly predicts that the order of the adjectives should be free which is against the empirical facts.
As an example, consider the categories epistemic modality which expresses a necessity or a possibility that is made by a speaker based on his/her knowledge, tense (which is a bit of an oversimplification here), ability, and an event description.
These layers are V-Projection (Verb) which includes the lexical content of the clause, an I-Projection (Inflectional) and a C-Projection (Complementizer) which connects to a matrix sentence or to discourse.
[9] This observation led to the simple mapping of functional features from 3 and to the conclusion that the C-system has a complex structure since “che” and “di” occupy different slots in this domain.
The standard order can be seen in the mapping from 13b:[9] The interrogative element “se” has been shown to have a similarly flexible order around Top (it can both be preceded and followed by Top) but it must nevertheless be in a higher position than Foc as in the mapping from 14:[16] An explanation for this is the fact that syntactic features delimit the C-system in layers.