Syntax is perhaps one of the most successful projects in the history of theoretical linguistics. It’s also garnered the most philosophical attention. Thus, this chapter focuses on syntactic metatheory. It surveys a number of prominent frameworks from minimalism to construction grammar, dependency grammar, lexical functional grammar and head-driven phrase structure grammar.The main aim is to find a common argument structure and strategy across diverse theoretical positions. In the tradition of recent work on scientific modelling in the philosophy of science, the approach that’s adopted in this chapter works from a bottom-up review of the cross-framework literature. I’ll make a case for a general explanatory strategy or scientific project at the core of linguistic syntax. The core idea is that this general scientific strategy is relatively stable across syntactic frameworks. In other words, the chapter aims to address the question of what minimalism, dependency grammar, radical construction grammar, head-driven phrase structure grammar, and lexical functional grammar have in common. The answer is a general formal strategy that focuses on rules in creating structural units, captures recursive phenomena, and, most importantly, treats syntactic information as explanatorily autonomous from other systems.

This chapter reviews all the assumptions deployed in Chapters 2–5 and indicates the specific roles played in the derivation of the requisite grammatical effects discussed therein. Bringing all the assumptions together in one place and showing what specific role they play in the derivations should allow dissenters to pick and choose what parts of the proposal they would like to keep and what to dump and the price of each move.

The book argues that the research program of modern Generative Grammar (GG) has been a resounding success. More particularly, it argues that the most current stage of this more general enterprise, the Minimalist Program (MP), has provided profound insights into the structure of the faculty of language (FL). The book outlines the central Minimalist thesis (the Merge Hypothesis) and suggests ways of extending its explanatory reach.

This chapter rounds off the book by recapitulating the argument that the research program of modern Generative Grammar has provided profound insights into the structure of the faculty of language (FL) to explain both linguistic creativity and linguistic flexibility. The proposal is that the Generative enterprise has allowed us to examine what kinds of recursive procedures natural language grammars contain, and to understand key aspects of the fine structure of FL. The Minimalist Program then asks the obvious next question of why FL has the particular structure Generativists discovered it to have. It is argued that the central Minimalist thesis, the Merge Hypothesis (MH), explains how linguistic creativity is the product of a very simple combinatoric operation (i.e. Merge), and then showed how the MH can be extended (into the EMH) by the addition of labels to cover most of the generalizations discovered in the past sixty years of Generative research.

Usama Soltan brings his considerable expertise in generative theory to bear on Arabic morphosyntax in Arabic dialects and in Standard Arabic. He focuses on three topics: agreement phenomena, case marking, and negation structures. Using a Principles and Parameters approach, he discusses subject-verb agreement asymmetry (SVAA) in Standard Arabic and first conjunct agreement in both Standard Arabic and in Arabic vernacular. As he notes, both these topics have garnered the interest of generative linguists in terms of their wider impact on general grammatical theory. Case marking, his second topic, pertains to Standard Arabic only, but is rich in history, analysis, and speculative theory within the Arabic linguistic tradition. Soltan focuses on subject and object marking of NPs, noting the difference between case assigners for each and discussing the role of syntactic government. The morphosyntax of negation is Soltan’s third topic, contrasting the various negation processes of Standard Arabic with the extensive negative formulations of Cairene Egyptian Arabic (CEA) and finding ‘a rich ground for the analysis of clausal structure and its implications’ where the study of the syntax of modern Arabic dialects contributes significantly to general linguistic theory.

This chapter explores the nature of syntactic competence -- what it means to ‘know’ a language. It asks how generative grammar has been used to model competence. After discussing the difference between prescriptive and descriptive rules, we describe procedures for discovering descriptively adequate rules. We distinguish inductive from deductive grammars, the latter of which are associated with classical transformational models of grammar, according to which human languages have all and only those (structural) properties that are expressible in the transformational formalism and the former of which are associated with constraint-based views of grammar, according to which an expression is syntactically well-formed if its form is paired with its meaning as an instance of some grammatical construction. It is this construction-based view of grammar that we adopt in this book. Construction Grammar offers an enriched model of grammatical competence, which attempts to capture all of the linguistic routines that an adult native speaker knows. In Construction Grammar, grammar represents an array of form-meaning-function groupings of varying degrees of productivity and internal complexity.