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6 results

  • 17 - Chomsky and the Turn to Syntax, Including Alternative Approaches to Syntax

  • from Part IIIB - 1960–2000: Formalism, Cognitivism, Language Use and Function, Interdisciplinarity
  • Edited by Linda R. Waugh, University of Arizona, Monique Monville-Burston, Cyprus University of Technology, John E. Joseph, University of Edinburgh
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Linguistics
    Published online:
    20 July 2023
    Print publication:
    10 August 2023, pp 549-576

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses the rise of Noam Chomsky’s formal, syntax centered, transformational grammar (T) and then ‘generative grammar’ (GG), chronicling its start in Syntactic Structures (1957), influenced by Zellig Harris, the Prague school, mathematics, set theory, Carnap and Goodman. In Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965, the ‘Standard Theory’), Chomsky defined competence (vs. performance), the creativity and infinitude of language, grammar as a theory of a language, sentence meaning (the Katz-Postal hypothesis), deep vs. surface structure, the formal ‘simplicity’ of the grammar, and Universal Grammar (UG).

    After 1965, alternative models, such as Generative Semantics and later Case Grammar arose, as well as Construction Grammar and Cognitive Linguistics, while Chomsky developed Extended Standard Theory (EST), leading to Government-Binding (GB), Principles-and-Parameters (P&P), modularity, and in the 1990s the Minimalist Program (MP), with ‘minimalist’ syntax but ‘maximal’ UG.

    Alternative approaches were varied, including Relational Grammar (RG), and also ‘superlexicalism,' with narrowly conceived T’s, constraint-based architecture, model-theoretic semantics, e.g., CF-PSG (Context-free Phrase Structure Grammar), Head-Driven PSG, and LFG (Lexical Functional Grammar), with no Ts -- and many others.

    While few followed the MP in 2000 and after, Chomsky’s influence was incontestable worldwide, especially for those who take a formal approach to grammar.

  • 16 - The Role of Working Memory in Shaping Syntactic Dependency Structures

  • from Part III - Linguistic Theories and Frameworks
  • Edited by John W. Schwieter, Zhisheng (Edward) Wen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Working Memory and Language
    Published online:
    08 July 2022
    Print publication:
    21 July 2022, pp 343-367

  • Summary

    Dependency syntax holds that the goal of syntactic analysis is to establish all the binary relations between words in a sentence. This process is closely related to working memory. In a sentence, the words between two syntactically related words make for dependency distance, which is an index of sentence comprehension difficulty because, when the two syntactically related words are combined to each other in working memory, the first of them may suffer from memory decay or memory interference caused by the intervening words. Thus, working memory and the least effort principle may dictate a universal tendency for syntactic structures to be organized in such ways as to reduce dependency distance. This tendency has great shaping effect on the patterns of word order in human languages and is potentially able to account for many linguistic universals in language typology. As for the sporadic long dependency structures motivated by communicative needs, specific syntactic patterns may have evolved, utilizing some cognitive mechanisms to lessen the memory load of these long dependencies. Syntactic structures, therefore, are probably the result of self-adaption of a language system to certain external human constraints and motivations, among which working memory is a very important one.

  • 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.

  • 6 - Lexical-Functional Grammar

  • 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 162-201

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses the earliest generative approaches, namely those explicated in Syntactic Structures and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. It examines some relevant differences between these two theories and discusses some general properties of transformations. The chapter reviews the syntax/semantics interface in early generative grammar and beyond. It also discusses the role in the evolving theories of rules and filters versus principles. In Principles and Parameters theory, Chomsky explicitly introduced economy principles for the first time. A major Minimalist concern involves the driving force for syntactic movement. The chapter also offers two economy principles: Relativized Minimality and the Extension Condition. It illustrates Rizzi's groundbreaking work by way of a phenomenon called Superiority, which has often been analyzed as a Relativized Minimality effect. Another potential example of an economy condition relates to the Extension Condition. This condition requires that a transformational operation extends the tree upwards.

  • 16 - Raisingand control

  • from Part IV - Syntactic processes: their nature, locality, and motivation
  • 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 577-606

  • Summary

    The study of the functional structure of the clause has changed the theoretical and descriptive study of natural language syntax. The lexical verb looked like a plausible candidate for the head of the sentence, but clearly the sentence potentially contained more material than a single X-bar schema could integrate. The V-to-I movement operation is not a formal trick to align syntax and morphology: it predicts that certain changes in word order should be produced by the movement of the verbal root. The close connection between syntax and morphology is confirmed by other cases of microcomparison. One domain which has been extensively investigated in this connection is the comparison between Icelandic and the Continental Scandinavian languages. The structural maps of the different zones of the clause have provided a model for pursuing on a large scale and on a fully systematic basis the project of a detailed cartography of syntactic structures.

  • 15 - Computational primitives in morphology and possible brain correlates

  • from Part II - Mind, brain, behavior
  • Edited by Cedric Boeckx, Kleanthes K. Grohmann, University of Cyprus
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Biolinguistics
    Published online:
    05 May 2013
    Print publication:
    14 February 2013, pp 283-308

  • Summary

    In order to build their lexicon, infants firstly have to find word units in the speech stream, and then associate each word form with a meaning. This chapter discusses these two steps of lexical acquisition, and focuses more precisely on the role of two cues: phrasal prosody and function words. The main language-universal cue is the use of statistical or distributional information. The intuition behind the use of transitional probabilities between syllables or phonemes is that sound sequences that occur frequently and in a variety of contexts are better candidates for the lexicon than those that occur rarely or in few contexts. The syntactic category of words is the simplest cue that could constrain word meaning. Indeed, nouns typically refer to objects, whereas verbs generally refer to actions and adjectives to properties. Recent studies have demonstrated that young infants know something about the categories of function words.