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9 results

Merge and the Strong Minimalist Thesis

Merge and the Strong Minimalist Thesis
  • Noam Chomsky, T. Daniel Seely, Robert C. Berwick, Sandiway Fong, M. A. C. Huybregts, Hisatsugu Kitahara, Andrew McInnerney, Yushi Sugimoto
  • Published online:
    17 November 2023
    Print publication:
    14 December 2023
  • The goal of this contribution to the Elements series is to closely examine Merge, its form, its function, and its central role in current linguistic theory. It explores what it does (and does not do), why it has the form it has, and its development over time. The basic idea behind Merge is quite simple. However, Merge interacts, in intricate ways, with other components including the language's interfaces, laws of nature, and certain language-specific conditions. Because of this, and because of its fundamental place in the human faculty of language, this Element's focus on Merge provides insights into the goals and development of generative grammar more generally, and its prospects for the future.

Inconsistency in Linguistic Theorising
  • András Kertész, Csilla Rákosi
  • Published online:
    23 June 2022
    Print publication:
    07 July 2022
  • It is widely believed that inconsistency is one of the greatest sins a scholar can commit. This issue is especially relevant in linguistics due to the rich diversity of data types, exceptions to the rules, counterexamples to the hypotheses, and background assumptions which constantly come into conflict with methodological principles. Bringing together ideas from linguistics and philosophy of science, this groundbreaking book seeks to answer the following questions: which kinds of inconsistency arise in linguistic theorising? Under which conditions can inconsistencies be tolerated? And how can inconsistencies be resolved? It is the first study to develop a novel metatheoretical framework that accounts for the emergence and the resolution of inconsistency in linguistic theorising, and to reveal the strategies of inconsistency resolution in theoretical linguistics. Supported by detailed case studies, the findings of this metatheoretical analysis can be applied to improve the effectiveness of the working linguist's problem-solving activity.

  • 3 - The Recent History of Attempts to Ground Orthographic Concepts of Language Theory

  • from Part I - Questions of Ontology: Writing and the Speech–Language Divide
  • Victor J. Boucher, Université de Montréal
  • Book:
    The Study of Speech Processes
    Published online:
    14 January 2021
    Print publication:
    21 January 2021, pp 52-72

  • Summary

    In the latter half of the twentieth century, language theory adopted a formalist approach that focused on sentence generation. While generative models were originally intended as computational accounts of sentence grammaticality, they were later taken to reflect an inborn competence and a “language learning device.” Yet formal grammars were being worked out from analyses of script using orthographic units and categories. Several problems arose in bootstrapping grammatical categories in the mind to units like words and phrases, which entailed a shoehorning of concepts of syntax to children's speech. While theory-driven perception research sought to confirm children’s recognition of words, studies of speech corpora indicate that young children are not manipulating units like words as separate units but chunked clusters of items. In documenting these problems, recent evidence is discussed showing that syntactic category information may not be represented as properties of words in the brain, undermining the hypothesis of a language acquisition device.

  • Minimaliser les dépendances Aʹ : résomptifs vs lacunes

  • Victor Junnan Pan
  • Journal:
    Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique / Volume 62 / Issue 1 / March 2017
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    16 January 2017, pp. 118-145

  • Cet article étudie la dérivation de deux types de dépendances Aʹ – les relatives et les structures à dislocation à gauche – dans le cadre du programme minimaliste. Le mandarin montre qu'une relative contenant soit un pronom résomptif soit une lacune et une dislocation à lacune sont dérivées par l'opération Accorder et sont soumises aux contraintes de localité et qu'une dislocation résomptive est dérivée par Match sans conditions d’îlot. «Transferts multiples» et « épellations multiples » sont légitimés dans les dépendances établies par Accorder mais pas dans celles dérivées par Match. Le choix du mécanisme dérivationnel dépend de l'interprétabilité des traits formels attachés à la sonde ainsi qu’à la cible dans une dépendance Aʹ.

  • 24 - Microsyntacticvariation

  • from Part VI - Syntax and the external interfaces
  • Edited by Marcel den Dikken, City University of New York
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax
    Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    25 July 2013, pp 899-926

  • Summary

    Tense, aspect, and modality are grammatical categories that occur as functional heads in clause structure. They are traditionally grouped together by virtue of their semantic cohesion and their frequent morphological clustering or fusion. Research in generative syntax has focused on describing the morphosyntactic encoding of features related to temporal meaning, and on accounting for the general properties of tenses that occur in natural language. The tense section outlines empirical generalizations and their generative syntactic description. The term 'aspect' refers to two different layers of temporal information in the predicate phrase: the classification of events according to their temporal properties (stative/non-stative, punctual/durative, telic/atelic); and grammatical aspect, a temporal framework within which the event is located or described. Modality and mood are relational categories that express a mode by which a proposition is anchored to the external context of evaluation.

  • 7 - Phrase structuregrammar

  • from Part II - Modern generative approaches to the study of sentence structure
  • Edited by Marcel den Dikken, City University of New York
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax
    Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    25 July 2013, pp 202-225

  • Summary

    Generative syntax embodies three complementary goals, two of which are adopted by all practitioners. The first two goals characterize what a 'possible human language' might be and provide formal grammars of individual languages. Generative syntacticians have not been very concerned with methodology. Chomsky set the tone for this lack of interest in Syntactic Structures. The generative methodology section focuses on the relative merits of introspective versus conversational data. The methodology section evaluates the recent trend to admit more and more types of semantic data as evidence in syntactic theorizing. All formal generative approaches to syntax outside of P-and-P have their roots in the lexicalist hypothesis, first proposed in Chomsky. The typological goal has in general played a much more important role in Cognitive-Functional Linguistics than in generative grammar. Cognitive-functional linguists tend to prioritize conversational and experimental data over introspective, though their day-to-day practice generally relies on the latter.

  • 5 - Minimalism and Optimality Theory

  • from Part II - Modern generative approaches to the study of sentence structure
  • Edited by Marcel den Dikken, City University of New York
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax
    Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    25 July 2013, pp 122-161

  • Summary

    This introductory chapter of the book The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax provides aim, structure and what is and is not included in the book. The book is designed to be a handbook in the truest sense of the term and the primary focus is the theory of generative syntax. The book is divided into six major parts and rich in empirical detail covering a broad range of different phenomena from a wide variety of the world's languages. In early generative grammar, statements enable anyone to synthesize or predict utterances in the language resurfaced as the phrase-structure (PS) rules that codified the well-formed underlying syntactic representations. With the introduction of the X-bar Theory of phrase structure, linear order was no longer automatically built into the phrase-structure component. Finally the book looks at linguistic variation, language development, and language production and processing, respectively.

  • 21 - Negationand negativepolarity

  • from Part V - Syntax and the internal interfaces
  • Edited by Marcel den Dikken, City University of New York
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax
    Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    25 July 2013, pp 793-826

  • Summary

    Core cases of agreement can be characterized as morphological marking on the central verb of a clause that reflects some features of a noun phrase in that clause. Virtually all generative treatments begin with subject-verb agreement, for reasons that are easy to understand. First, this is the most common kind, being found in almost 75 percent of languages sampled, whereas object agreement is only found in some 50 percent. In addition to changing perspective on the structural conditions on agreement, Chomsky also inverted the relative importance of agreement and case within generative syntax. The role of case theory is now often backgrounded, and case is seen as an additional side effect of the primary relation of Agree. The agreement and case are lively areas of ongoing inquiry, an integral part in one way or another of the larger generative enterprise.

  • Relative inversion and non-verb-initial imperatives in Early Modern Swedish

  • Erik Magnusson Petzell
  • Journal:
    Nordic Journal of Linguistics / Volume 36 / Issue 1 / May 2013
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    12 June 2013, pp. 27-55

  • This article deals with two syntactic differences between Present-Day Swedish (PDSw) and Early Modern Swedish (EMSw): first, only EMSw allows VS and XVS word order to occur in relative clauses; second, only EMSw permits non-verb-initial imperatives. One structural difference between the varieties is assumed to be a prerequisite for all these word order differences: the subject position was spec-TP in EMSw but is spec-FinP in PDSw. Only the lower position (spec-TP) is compatible with inversion (VS) and fronting of non-subjects (XVS) in relative clauses as well as with imperative clauses having elements other than the imperative verb in the initial position. To be able to account for the latter phenomenon, however, an additional assumption is needed: the imperative type-feature, [imp], always accompanies the verb in PDSw but is tied to an operator in EMSw. The first assumption about differing subject positions is independently motivated by findings already in the previous literature. The second assumption about the differing behaviour of [imp] in the two varieties is supported by the distribution of imperative verbs over a wider range of syntactic contexts in EMSw than in PDSw.