INTRODUCTION WERNER ABRAHAM, LACI MARÁCZ, SJAAK DE MEY & WIM SCHERPENISSE University of Groningen The Groningen Conference on Topic, ...

This is an introduction to the structure of sentences in human languages. It assumes no prior knowledge of linguistic theory and little of elementary grammar. It will suit students coming to syntactic theory for the first time either as graduates or undergraduates. It will also be useful for those in fields such as computational science, artificial intelligence, or cognitive psychology who need a sound knowledge of current syntactic theory.

Although ‘glue semantics’ is the most extensively developed theory of semantic composition for LFG, it is not very well integrated into the LFG projection architecture, due to the absence of a simple and well-explained correspondence between glue-proofs and f-structures. In this paper I will show that we can improve this situation with two steps: (1) Replace the current quantificational formulations of glue (either Girard’s system F, or first order linear logic) with strictly propositional linear logic (the quantifier, unit and exponential (...) free version of either MILL or ILL, depending on whether or not tensors are used). (2) Reverse the direction of the standard σ-projection from f-structure to meaning, giving one going from the (atomic nodes of) the glue-proof to the f-structure, rather than from the f-structure to a ‘semantic projection’ which is itself somehow related to the glue-proof. As a side effect, the standard semantic projection of LFG glue semantics can be dispensed with. A result is that LFG sentence structures acquire a level composed of strictly binary trees, constructed out of nodes representing function application and lambda abstraction, with a significant resemblance to external and internal merge in the Minimalist Program. This increased resemblance between frameworks might assist in making useful comparisons. (shrink)

Many (all?) languages regiment differences between main and subordinate clauses and between straightforward assertions and other kinds of expressions. There are two main ways of expressing grammatical differences in natural languages: structural and inflectional. Other resources: lexical, intonational, etc.

[1]. Recently renewed interest in non transformational approaches to syntax [2] suggests that it might be well to take another look at categorial grammars, since they seem to have been neglected largely because they had been shown to be equivalent to context free phrase structure grammars in weak generative capacity and it was believed that such grammars were incapable of describing natural languages in a natural way. It is my purpose here to sketch a theory of grammar which represents a (...) generalization of categorial grammars of the sort invented by Ajdukiewicz (1935) and further elaborated especially by Bar Hillel (1953) and Lambek (1961). (shrink)

Suppose that one adopts a broadly Chomskyan perspective, in which there is a distinction between the language faculty and other cognitive faculties, including what Chomsky has recently called the “Conceptual-Intensional system”. Then there must in principle be at least three stages in this association that need to be understood. First, there is the nonlinguistic stage of conceptualizing a particular event.1 For example, while all of the participants in an event may be affected by the event in some way or another, (...) human cognizers typically focus on one or the other of those changes as being particularly salient or relevant to their interests. This participant is taken to be the “theme” or “patient” of the event, perhaps in some kind of nonlinguistic conceptual representation, such as the one developed by Jackendoff (1983, 1990b). Second, this conceptual/thematic representation is associated with a linguistic representation in which the entity seen as the patient of the event is represented as (say) an NP that is the direct object of the verb that expresses what kind of an event it was. This is the interface between language and the conceptual system. Finally, there is the possibility of adjusting this representation internally to the language system, by way of movements, chain formations, Case assignment processes, or whatever other purely syntactic processes there may be. For example, the NP that represents the theme and starts out as the direct object of the verb may become the subject if there is no other subject in the linguistic representation, either because there was no agent in the conceptual representation (as with an unaccusative verb), or because it was suppressed (as with a passive verb). (shrink)

This paper shows that a VP in English is only a VP at the outset of a derivation, and that VP- preposing in English is in fact preposing of the internal arguments of the verb, followed by remnant movement of the original VP. Therefore, English looks much more like German (Muller (1998)), than it appears at first glance The evidence for the non-constituency of the verb and its original arguments in preposed position comes from its solution to what has been (...) termed Pesetsky’s Paradox, in that an object of a preposed VP can bind into an adverbial at the end of a sentence. The paradox results from the incompatibility of the phenomenon with the conjunction of two assumptions: (i) binding requires c-command; (ii) only constituents move.. Assumption (i) requires the object to be higher than the adverbial, but the preposing of the verb and object to the exclusion of the adverbial would then require that a non-constituent (the verb and object) prepose. The paradoxical nature of the phenomenon rests on the two assumptions, and the paper presents additional evidence that binding requires c-command, showing the contrasts between topicalized VPs and topicalized PPs. The full set of binding phenomena can be accounted for with a ccommand requirement on binding, but cannot be accounted for with a rival account of command that makes reference to grammatical functions, known as o-command within HPSG (Pollard and Sag (1992, 1994) or ranking (Bresnan (2002)) or f-command (Dalrymple (1999)). (shrink)

This chapter will concentrate on a range of phenomena that have crucially been held to involve (within Government-Binding Theory and now Minimalism) movement of an element to what is known as an argument position- roughly, a position in which an element can be base-generated and bear a crucial semantic role with respect to the main predicate of a clause. It is to be distinguished from movement to an ~A (read A-bar, or non-argument) position. The two types of movement have very (...) different properties. (shrink)

One of the cardinal assumptions about the nature of grammar is that it is a formal system, meaning that the operations and symbols in the grammar should have a precise meaning, so that one can tell precisely how it functions, and whether a given structure is in fact created by the grammar. The issue of how much information is available to the grammar, viewed as a computational device that computes structures, is called the issue of computational complexity. The computational powers (...) of various grammars, and the capacity of recognition devices to characterize as licit or not the structures that they generate, has been the province of mathematical linguistics, but has also occasionally been felt to have implications for empirical syntactic theory. One central question that has raised its head over the years is the question of whether or not grammar ( which is now referred to as CHL, for Computation of Human Language (Chomsky (1995)) is Markovian, an issue first raised in Chomsky (1957). For a computational device to be Markovian, it can only make reference to the current state that the device is in, when deciding what the next state of the device can be; it cannot, for example, make reference to alternative states, earlier states, future states, or , as a consequence of its being a formal system, factors outside of the computational device. (shrink)

This book examines the hypothesis of "direct compositionality", which requires that semantic interpretation proceed in tandem with syntactic combination. Although associated with the dominant view in formal semantics of the 1970s and 1980s, the feasibility of direct compositionality remained unsettled, and more recently the discussion as to whether or not this view can be maintained has receded. The syntax-semantics interaction is now often seen as a process in which the syntax builds representations which, at the abstract level of logical form, (...) are sent for interpretation to the semantics component of the language faculty. In the first extended discussion of the hypothesis of direct compositionality for twenty years, this book considers whether its abandonment might have been premature and whether in fact direct compositionality is not after all a simpler and more effective conception of the grammar than the conventional account of the syntax-semantics interface in generative grammar. It contains contributions from both sides of the debate, locates the debate in the setting of a variety of formal theories, and draws on examples from a range of languages and a range of empirical phenomena. (shrink)

This book analyzes--in terms of branching--the pervasive reorganization of Latin syntactic and morphological structures: in the development from Latin to French, a shift can be observed from the archaic, left-branching structures (which Latin inherited from Proto-Indo-European) to modern right-branching equivalents. Brigitte Bauer presents a detailed analysis of this development based on the theoretical discussion and definition of "branching" and "head." Subsequently she relates the diachronic shift to psycholinguistic evidence, arguing that the difficuly of LB complex structures as reflected in their (...) painstaking and delayed acquisition accounts for the extensive typological shift from left to right branching that took place in Latin/French and the other Indo-European languages. (shrink)

This paper addresses the problem of the origin and principle of Aristotle’s distinctions among the categories. It explores the possibilities of reformulating and reviving the “grammatical” theory, generally ascribed first to Trendelenburg. The paper brings two new perspectives to the grammatical theory: that of Aristotle’s own theory of syntax and that of contemporary linguistic syntax and semantics. I put forth a provisional theory of Aristotle’s categories in which (1) I propose that the Categories sets forth a theory of lexical structure, (...) with the ten categories emerging as lexical or semantic categories, and (2) I suggest conceptual links, both in Aristotle’s writings and in actuality, between these semantic categories and certain grammatical inflections. (shrink)

Cedric Boeckx focuses on two core components of grammar: phrase structure and locality.

Understanding Minimalist Syntax introduces the logic of the Minimalist Program by analyzing well-known descriptive generalizations about long-distance dependencies. Proposes a new theory of how long-distance dependencies are formed, with implications for theories of locality, and the Minimalist Program as a whole Rich in empirical coverage, which will be welcomed by experts in the field, yet accessible enough for students looking for an introduction to the Minimalist Program.

John Searle has argued against the viability of strong versions of artificial intelligence. His most well-known counter-example is the Chinese Room thought experiment where he stressed that syntax is not semantics. We reason by analogy to highlight previously unnoticed similarities between Searle and F.A. Hayek's critique of socialist planning. We extend their insights to explain the failure of many reforms in Eastern Europe in the 1990's.

This book is a collection of key readings on Minimalist Syntax, the most recent, and arguably most important, theoretical development within the Principles and Parameters approach to syntactic theory. Brings together in one volume the key readings on Minimalist Syntax Includes an introduction and overview of the Minimalist Program written by two prominent researchers Excerpts crucial pieces from the beginning of Minimalism to the most recent work and provides invaluable coverage of the most important topics.

Split constructions are widespread in natural languages. The separation of the semantic restriction of a quantifier from that quantifier is a typical example of such a construction. This study addresses the problem that such discontinuous strings exhibit--namely, a number of locality constraints, including intervention effects. These are shown to follow from the interaction of a minimalist syntax with a semantics that directly assigns a model-theoretic interpretation to syntactic logical forms. The approach is shown to have wide empirical coverage and a (...) conceptual simplicity. The book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of syntax and semantics. (shrink)

I argue that we should not adopt categorial restrictions on the significance of syntactically well-formed strings. Even syntactically well-formed but semantically absurd strings, such as ‘Life is but a walking shadow’ and ‘Caesar is a prime number’, can express thoughts; and competent thinkers both can and ought to be able to grasp such thoughts. A more specific way of putting this claim is that Gareth Evans’ Generality Constraint should be viewed as a fully general constraint on concept possession and propositional (...) thought, even though Evans himself accepted only a categorially-restricted version of the Constraint. I establish this by arguing, first, that even well-formed but semantically cross-categorial strings often do possess substantive inferential roles; second, that hearers exploit these inferential roles in interpreting such strings metaphorically; and third, that there is no good reason to deny truth-conditions to strings with inferential roles. (shrink)

The expression ‘Like’ has a wide variety of uses among English and American speakers. It may describe preference, as in (1) She likes mint chip ice cream. It may be used as a vehicle of comparison, as in (2) Trieste is like Minsk on steroids.

Building on the success of the bestselling first edition, the second edition of this textbook provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the major issues in Principles and Parameters syntactic theory, including phrase structure, the lexicon, case theory, movement, and locality conditions. Includes new and extended problem sets in every chapter, all of which have been annotated for level and skill type. Features three new chapters on advanced topics including vP shells, object shells, control, gapping and ellipsis and an additional (...) chapter on advanced topics in binding. Offers a brief survey of both Lexical-Functional Grammar and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Succeeds in strengthening the reader's foundational knowledge, and prepares them for more advanced study. Supported by an instructor's manual and online resources for students and instructors, available at www.blackwellpublishing.com/carnie. (shrink)

This volume contains twelve chapters on the derivation of and the correlates to verb initial word order. The studies in this volume cover such widely divergent languages as Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Old Irish, Biblical Hebrew, Jakaltek, Mam, Lummi (Straits Salish), Niuean, Malagasy, Palauan, K'echi', and Zapotec, from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives, including Minimalism, information structure, and sentence processing. The first book to take a crosslinguistic comparative approach to verb initial syntax, this volume provides new data to some (...) old problems anddebates and explores some innovative approaches to the derivation of verb initial order. (shrink)

Dienes & Perner (D&P) link explicit knowledge of facts to predication. But predication is basically a linguistic notion. Their approach therefore makes it difficult to attribute knowledge of facts to non- language-users, such as animals. The explicit/implicit distinction, as D&P formulate it, is accordingly of little use for exploring the cognitive capacities of nonhuman primates – despite the increasing evidence for sophisticated social awareness among apes, implying mental representations of events in which participants are clearly distinguished. A revised formulation, less (...) biased toward syntax as it happens to have evolved in humans, could avoid this drawback. (shrink)

Chapter one Introduction The lexicon has come to play an increasingly important role in generative grammar. The first widely read monograph on generative ...

o (2000), 243). In particular, the idea is that binding interactions between the relevant expressions and natural lan- guage quantifiers are best explained by the hypothesis that those expressions harbor hidden but bindable variables. Recently, however, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore have rejected such binding arguments for the presence of hid- den variables on the grounds that they overgeneralize — that, if sound, such arguments would establish the presence of hidden variables in all sorts of ex- pressions where it is (...) implausible that they exist (Cappelen and Lepore (2005), Cappelen and Lepore (2002)).1 In what follows we respond to Cappelen’s and Lepore’s attempted reductio by bringing out crucial disanalogies between cases where the binding argument is successful and cases where it is not. But we have a deeper purpose than merely to respond to Cappelen and Lepore: we think the attempted reductio goes wrong by not taking sufficiently seriously the nature of the binding relation that holds between quantifiers and arguments/variables, and that our criticism will serve to highlight the nature and importance of this relation. (shrink)

Much of the best contemporary work in the philosophy of language and content makes appeal to the theories developed in generative syntax. In particular, there is a presumption that-at some level and in some way-the structures provided by syntactic theory mesh with or support our conception of content/linguistic meaning as grounded in our first-person understanding of our communicative speech acts. This paper will suggest that there is no such tight fit. Its claim will be that, if recent generative theories are (...) on the right lines, syntactic structure provides both too much and too little to serve as the structural partner for content, at least as that notion is generally understood in philosophy. The paper will substantiate these claims by an assessment of the recent work of King, Stanley, and others. (shrink)

I argue for a cognitive architecture in which folk psychology is supported by an interface of a ToM module and the language faculty, the latter providing the former with interpreted LF structures which form the content representations of ToM states. I show that LF structures satisfy a range of key features asked of contents. I confront this account of ToM with eliminativism and diagnose and combat the thought that "success" and innateness are inconsistent with the falsity of folk psychology. I (...) show that, while my ensemble account of ToM and language refutes the culturalist presuppositions that tend to underlie eliminativist arguments, the falsity of folk psychology is consistent with the account. (shrink)

Language and Ontology: Linguistic Relativism (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) vs. Universal Grammar Universal Ontology vs. Ontological Relativity Semiotics and Ontology: Annotated Bibliography of John Deely. First part: 1965-1998 Annotated Bibliography of John Deely. Second part: 1999-2010 The Rediscovery of John Poinsot (John of St. Thomas).

... the phenomenon of variable word order within a clause. Ross (), who was one of the first to discuss this phenomenon within the generative paradigm, ...

Book Information Logical Form and Language. Edited by G. Preyer and G. Peter. Clarendon Press. Oxford. 2002. Pp. x + 512. Hardback, £55. Paperback, £19.99.

My book, Ignorance of Language (2006a), challenges the received Chomskian “psychological conception” of grammars and proposes a “linguistic conception” according to which a grammar is a theory of a representational system. My response to Guy Longworth rejects his claim in “Ignorance of Linguistics” (2009) that there is “mutual determination” between linguistic and psychological facts with the result that both of these conceptions are true. Peter Slezak’s “Linguistic Explanation and ‘Psychological Reality’” (2009) is full of flagrant misrepresentations of my discussion of (...) the psychological conception and of the psychological reality of linguistic principles and rules. My response summarizes the worst of these misrepresentations. (shrink)

Deficits observed in Broca's aphasia are much more general than Grodzinsky acknowledges. Broca's aphasics have a broad range of problems in lexical and morphological comprehension; furthermore, the classic “agrammatic” syntactic profile is observed over many populations. Finally, Broca's area is implicated in the performance of many linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks.

The theoretical debate in linguistics during the past half-century bears an uncanny parallel to the politics of the (now defunct) Communist Bloc. The parallels are not so much in the revolutionary nature of Chomsky's ideas as in the Bolshevik manner of his takeover of linguistics (Koerner 1994) and in the Trotskyist (“permanent revolution”) flavor of the subsequent development of the doctrine of Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG) (Townsend & Bever 2001, pp. 37–40). By those standards, Jackendoff is quite a party faithful (...) (a Khrushchev or a Dubcek, rather than a Solzhenitsyn or a Sakharov) who questions some of the components of the dogma, yet stops far short of repudiating it. (shrink)

W.V. Quine has led many logicians in thinking that mathematical logic can offer insights into the syntax of natural language. One example of such an insight is the use of quantifier scope difference to resolve the ambiguity of sentences like ' I don't know every poem'. Such differences also are claimed to be useful in analyzing phrases such as 'the lady I saw you with'. But an older, Aristotelian theory of logical syntax can equally well resolve the ambiguity problem in (...) terms of term distribution. And it provides a better analysis of 'the lady' phrase by treating quantifiers as subject formatives rather than pronoun binders. (shrink)

Peter Geach has charged Aristotle with the sin of corrupting logic by initiating a process which led to the view that a sentence consists logically of just two names. This charge can only result from a clearly mistaken view of Aristotle's theory of logical syntax. Aristotle, unlike Geach, was careful to distinguish subjects from subject-terms and predicates from predicate-terms. He took both subjects and predicates as syntactical complexes. Geach, following Frege, holds a very different theory of logical syntax which takes (...) predicates, but not subjects, as syntactically complex. (shrink)

1. Introduction -- 2. Different views on grammaticalisation and its relation to word-order -- 3. Historical overview of oblique subjects in Germanic and Romance -- 4. Historical overview of stylistic fronting in Germanic and Romance -- 5. Accounting for the differences and similarities between the languages under investigation -- 6. Explaining the changes: minimalism meets von Humboldt and Meillet -- References.

The neo-Gricean account: the source of these scalar implicatures is a reasoning process (undertaken by the hearer), which culminates in an inference about the belief state of the speaker.

This paper proposes an architecture for the mapping between syntax and phonology — in particular, that aspect of phonology that determines ordering. In Fox and Pesetsky (in prep.), we will argue that this architecture, when combined with a general theory of syntactic domains ("phases"), provides a new understanding of a variety of phenomena that have received diverse accounts in the literature. This shorter paper focuses on two processes, both drawn from Scandinavian: the familiar process of Object Shift and the less (...) well-known process of Quantifier Movement. We will argue that constraints on these operations can be seen as instances of the same property of grammar that explains the fact that movement is local and successive cyclic. We begin by sketching a model in which locality and successive cyclicity are consequences of the architecture that we propose, rather than specific facts about movement itself. We next present our proposal in somewhat greater detail, and show how it can account for a wide range of apparent limitations on movement — in particular, superficially contradictory restrictions on Object Shift and Quantifier Movement. The restrictions on Object Shift include those grouped under the rubric of Holmberg's Generalization, which Quantifier Movement does not seem to obey. We will argue that Quantifier Movement instead obeys a near mirror-image of Holmberg's Generalization (an "Inverse Holmberg Effect"), but that both Holmberg's Generalization and its mirror image are expected if our proposed architecture is correct. (shrink)

This collection covers the fundamental concepts and analytic tools of generative transformational syntax of the last half century, from Chomsky's Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew (1951) to the present day. It makes available, in one place, key published material on important areas such as phrase structure, transformations, and conditions on rules and representations. Presenting articles by leading contributors to the field such as Baltin, Bokovic, Bresnan, Chomsky, Cinque, Emonds, Freidin, Hale, Higginbotham, Huang, Kayne, Lasnik, McCawley, Pollock, Postal, Reinhart, Rizzi, Ross, Stowell, (...) Torrego, Travis, Vergnaud, and Williams, this fascinating collection also includes a general introduction by the editors and an index, thus providing a comprehensive single reference resource for students and researchers alike. (shrink)

The notion that the working-memory system is not to be located in the prefrontal cortex, but rather constituted by the interplay between temporal and frontal areas, is of some attraction. However, at least for the domain of sentence comprehension, this perspective is promoted on the basis of sparse data. For this domain, the authors not only missed out on the chance to systematically integrate event-related brain potential (ERP) and neuroimaging data when interpreting their own findings on semantic aspects of working (...) memory, but also neglected syntactic aspects of working memory and computation altogether. (shrink)

In this book, ten essays examine the contributions made to the issue of the philosophical significance of grammar by Frege, Russell, Bradley, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Carnap and Heidegger.

This paper is obsolete. It is superseded by the book, Conditionals in Context, MIT Press, 2005.

In this paper, we contrast English and Greek resultative secondary predication, showing that Greek lacks the productive syntactic strategy which English employs. We propose that the difference in productivity should be attributed to properties of the morphology in the two languages (namely, to the differing productivity of certain verbal affixes). Finally, we give a compositional semantics for the complex event formation in the morphology/syntax that accounts for the contrasts between resultatives in English and Greek.

In this book, Yael Greenberg discusses and clarifies a number of controversial issues and phenomena in the generic literature, including the existence of ...

The approach to generative grammar originating with Chomsky (1957) has been enormously successful within linguistics. Seeing such success, one wonders whether a similar approach might help us understand other human domains besides language. One such domain is morality. Could there be universal generative moral grammar? More specifically, might it be useful to moral theory to develop an explicit generative account of parts of particular moralities in the way it has proved useful to linguistics to produce generative grammars for parts of (...) particular languages? Should moral theorists attempt to develop a theory of moral universals that is analogous to the theory of universal grammar in linguistics? Can moral theorists develop a “principles and parameters” account of possible moralities inspired by the principles and parameters approach to language in current linguistics? Could there be a “minimalist” program for moral theory inspired by the minimalist program in linguistics? In this chapter we offer a preliminary account of some analogies, focusing on clarifying issues, making distinctions, and considering how—in a general way—such analogies might yield a fruitful research program for moral theory. There are two main parts to our discussion, one focusing on an analogy between generative grammar and moral theory, the other focusing on analogies between universal grammar and theories of moral universals. In the first part, we say a little about the background and say how we are going to understand morality and moral theory. We describe certain aspects of generative grammar and how claims about generative grammars are tested, allowing for a distinction between “competence” and “performance”. We then try to say what a corresponding “generative moral grammar” would be and how it would be tested. We next discuss a number of objections to the analogy between moral theory and generative grammar and indicate possible responses. In the second part, we discuss certain universal constraints on grammars and consider whether there might be similar constraints on moralities. Then we discuss how linguists describe core aspects of languages in terms of principles and parameters and consider what aspects of moralities might be described in similar terms. After that we make some brief remarks about minimalism. (shrink)

There are reasons for reservations with respect to the postulated function of Broca's area. Evidence for the psychological reality of the relevant traces does not exist. In addition, because the syntax of non- (or partly) configurational languages is not described in terms of empty categories, no receptive agrammatism should be observed in these languages. Aphasia should not be examined in isolation from its cognitive components.

This is the first book to approach depictive secondary predication - a hot topic in syntax and semantics research - from a crosslinguistic perspective. It maps out all the relevant phenomena and brings together critical surveys and new contributions on their morphosyntactic and semantic properties.

A traditional view maintains that thought, while expressed in language, is non-linguistic in nature and occurs in non-linguistic beings as well. I assess this view against current theories of the evolutionary design of human grammar. I argue that even if some forms of human thought are shared with non-human animals, a residue remains that characterizes a unique way in which human thought is organized as a system. I explore the hypothesis that the cause of this difference is a grammatical way (...) of structuring semantic information, and I present evidence that the organization of grammar precisely reflects the organization of a specific mode of thought apparently distinctive of humans. Since there appears to be no known non-grammatical structuring principle for the relevant mode of thought, I suggest that grammar is that principle, with no independent ?Language of Thought? needed. (shrink)

Possession and transitivity -- The indirect object, its status and place -- Categories and arguments -- The active-passive configuration -- Verbal affixation -- Why Kaatje was not heard sing a song (with Hans Bennis) -- T-chains and auxiliaries (with Jacqueline Guéron) -- Clitics in romance and the study of head-movement -- ECP, tense and islands -- Bracketing paradoxes do not exist (with Harry van der Hulst and Frans van der Putten) -- The nominal infinitive (with Pim Wehrmann) -- Parallels between (...) nominal and verbal projections -- Complex verbs (with Monic Lansu and Marion Westerduin) -- Small clauses everywhere. (shrink)

It has become fashionable recently to speak of linguistic inquiry as biolinguistics, an attempt to frame questions of linguistic theory in a biological context. The Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2001) is of course the most prominent stream of research in this paradigm. However, an alternative stream within the paradigm, the Parallel Architecture, has been developing in my own work over the past 30 years; it includes two important subcomponents, Conceptual Structure and Simpler Syntax (Jackendoff 2002, 2007b; Culicover and Jackendoff 2005). (...) The present article will show how the Parallel Architecture is in many ways a more promising realization of biolinguistic goals than the Minimalist Program, and that it is more conducive to integration with both the rest of linguistic theory and the rest of cognitive science. (shrink)

mar of a language? What are the consequences of these only the ‘tryer’ but also the ‘drinker’, even though the noun roles for syntactic structure, and why does it matter? We phrase Ozzie is not overtly an argument of the verb drink. sketch the Simpler Syntax Hypothesis, which holds that..

The term ‘logical form’ has been called on to serve a wide range of purposes in philosophy, and it would be too ambitious to try to survey all of them in a single essay. Instead, I will focus on just one conception of logical form that has occupied a central place in the philosophy of language, and in particular in the philosophical study of linguistic meaning. This is what I will call the classical conception of logical form. The classical conception, (...) as I will present it in section 1, has (either explicitly or implicitly) shaped a great deal of important philosophical work in semantic theory. But it has come under fire in recent decades, and in sections 2 and 3 I will discuss two of the recent challenges that I take to be most interesting and significant. (shrink)

Theorists have oversold the usefulness of predicate logic and generative grammar to the study of language origins. They have searched for models that correspond to semantic properties, such as truth, when what is needed is an empirically testable model of evolution. Such a model is required if we are to explain the origins of linguistic properties by appealing to general properties of linguistic engendering, rather than to the advent of genotypes with the propensity to produce certain brain mechanisms. While the (...) latter sort of explanation has a place, no theory can be considered an `evolutionary' theory without the former. We introduce a general notion of engendering, whose primary virtue is its freedom from assumptions regarding the nature of colloquial change. We use it to frame a conjecture about the evolution of centre embedded clauses; one which makes the fewest possible assumptions about the neural requirements upon individual brains. Keywords: biology of language; epigenesis; engendering; evolution; mutation; population; recursion. (shrink)

" It is the connected presentation of Jespersen's views of the general principles of grammar based on years of studying various languages through both direct ...

Syntax is better viewed as the dynamics of a morphogenetic field on a semantic universe of “content” words. This may take widely different forms, making the acquisition of any language by an aspiring speaker an entirely new experience. The existence of an underlying “universal syntax” might be illusory.

Word Order and Scrambling introduces readers to recent research into the linguistic phenomenon called scrambling and is a valuable contribution to the fields of ...

1999. In Linguistics in the Morning Calm 4 edited by The Linguistric Society of Korea. Hanshin Pub.co. pp. 21-39.

Grammatical categories of English expressions are shown to differ with regard to the freedom we have in semantically interpreting their lexical (= syntactically simplest) expressions. Section 1 reviews the categories of expression we consider. Section 2 empirically supports that certain of these categories are lexically free, a notion we formally define, in the sense that anything which is denotable by a complex expression in the category is available as a denotation for lexical expressions in the category. Other categories are shown (...) to be not lexically free. Thus for those categories the interpretation of lexical expressions is inherently constrained compared to the interpretation of the full class of expressions in the category. (shrink)

This commentary argues that dialogue alignment can be explained if parsing-directed grammar formalisms are adopted. With syntax defined as monotonic growth of semantic representations as each word is parsed, alignment between interlocutors is shown to be expected. Hence, grammars can be evaluated according to relative success in characterizing dialogue phenomena.

Chomsky’s principle of epistemological tolerance says that in theoretical linguistics contradictions between the data and the hypotheses may be temporarily tolerated in order to protect the explanatory power of the theory. The paper raises the following problem: What kinds of contradictions may be tolerated between the data and the hypotheses in theoretical linguistics? First a model of paraconsistent logic is introduced which differentiates between week and strong contradiction. As a second step, a case study is carried out which exemplifies that (...) the principle of epistemological tolerance may be interpreted as the tolerance of week contradiction. The third step of the argumentation focuses on another case study which exemplifies that the principle of epistemological tolerance must not be interpreted as the tolerance of strong contradiction. The reason for the latter insight is the unreliability and the uncertainty of introspective data. From this finding the author draws the conclusion that it is the integration of different data types that may lead to the improvement of current theoretical linguistics and that the integration of different data types requires a novel methodology which, for the time being, is not available. (shrink)

An interesting asymmetry in syntactic change is that OV base order is commonly replaced by VO, whereas the reverse development is quite rare in languages.1 A shift to VO has taken place in several branches of the Indo-European family, as well as in Finno-Ugric. The Germanic languages conform to this trend in that the original OV order seen in its older representatives, and (in more rigid form) in modern German, Dutch, and Frisian, has given way to a consistently head-initial syntax (...) in English, Scandinavian, and Yiddish. (shrink)

According to a widespread view the lexicon is a kind of appendix to the grammar, whose function is to list what is unpredictable and irregular about the words of a language. In more recent studies it has been acquiring a rich internal organization of its own and is becoming recognized as the site of pervasive grammatical regularities. The particular approach to the lexicon that I will assume in this paper comes out of this trend, integrating several ideas from work on (...) both morphology and phonology in the seventies. I shall begin by outlining the central assumptions and their motivation, and proceed to a series of issues raised by this framework which,have to do with the proper formulation of word—formation processes. (shrink)

In this book, a new theory of grammar based on word order is proposed: a deep word order as the multipartioned communicative-information structure of the ...

We translate sentence generation from TAG grammars with semantic and pragmatic information into a planning problem by encoding the contribution of each word declaratively and explicitly. This allows us to exploit the performance of off-the-shelf planners. It also opens up new perspectives on referring expression generation and the relationship between language and action.

This book argues that languages are composed of sets of ‘signs’, rather than ‘strings’. This notion, first posited by de Saussure in the early 20th century, has for decades been neglected by linguists, particularly following Chomsky’s heavy critiques of the 1950s. Yet since the emergence of formal semantics in the 1970s, the issue of compositionality has gained traction in the theoretical debate, becoming a selling point for linguistic theories. Yet the concept of ‘compositionality’ itself remains ill-defined, an issue this book (...) addresses. Positioning compositionality as a cornerstone in linguistic theory, it argues that, contrary to widely held beliefs, there exist non-compositional languages, which shows that the concept of compositionality has empirical content. The author asserts that the existence of syntactic structure can flow from the fact that a compositional grammar cannot be delivered without prior agreement on the syntactic structure of the constituents. (shrink)

In transformational grammar the notion of a chain has been central ever since its introduction in the early 80's. However, an insightful theory of chains has hitherto been missing. This paper develops such a theory of chains. Though it is applicable to virtually all chains, we shall focus on movement-induced chains. It will become apparent that chains are far from innocuous. A proper formulation of the structures and algorithms involved is quite a demanding task. Furthermore, we shall show that it (...) is possible to define structures in which the notion of a chain coincides with that of a constituent, so that the notion of a chain becomes redundant, generally without making the theory more complicated. These structures avoid some of the problems that beset the standard structures (such as unbound traces created by remnant movement). (shrink)

They are expressives, too. There is a phonology. There is a syntax. There is a compositional semantics. There are interesting interactions to investigate. German, Greek, and Papago are known examples of discourse particle languages. Intonation has been said to have similar uses in other languages.

I think that some of the arguments in this article are themselves flawed, or are based on an understanding of linguistics that is too narrowly focused on certain versions of generative grammar. For example, the argument that in computational applications purely statistical approaches are in general more successful than rule-based approaches has to be qualified: It holds, or may have hold, for certain applications like machine translation, but not for others, like the generation of text to answer queries to databases. (...) Furthermore, statistical methods have been integrated in certain linguistic theories themselves, like stochastic optimality theory (Boersma & Hayes 2001). The authors also claim that linguistics is not able to come up with leading questions for the cognitive and neurophysiological investigation of language processing. This statement is even more puzzling, as it is difficult to name serious research in psycholinguistics or in neurophysiological aspects of language processing that is not informed by theoretical notions rooted in linguistics, many of them derived from generative grammar. To cite just one case: Recursion has been proposed – perhaps unjustly so – as the single property that distinguishes human language processing from other animal communication systems; this has led to the identification of special brain regions and pathways of recursive language processing (cf. Friederici 2009). (shrink)

In this paper, a formal theory is presented that describes syntactic and semantic mechanisms of philosophical discourses. They are treated as peculiar language systems possessing deep derivational structures called architectonic forms of philosophical systems, encoded in philosophical mind. Architectonic forms are constituents of more complex structures called architectonic spaces of philosophy. They are understood as formal and algorithmic representations of various philosophical traditions. The formal derivational machinery of a given space determines its class of all possible architectonic forms. Some of (...) them stand under factual historical philosophical systems and they organize processes of doing philosophy within these systems. Many architectonic forms have never been realized in the history of philosophy. The presented theory may be interpreted as falling under Hegel’s paradigm of comprehending cultural texts. This paradigm is enriched and inspired with Propp’s formal, morphological view on texts. The peculiarity of this modification of the Hegel-Propp paradigm consists of the use of algebraic and algorithmic tools of modeling processes of cultural development. To speak metaphorically, the theory is an attempt at the mathematical and logical history of philosophy inspired by the Internet metaphor. And that is why it belongs to the tradition of doing metaphilosophy in The Lvov-Warsaw School, which is continued today mainly by Woleński, Pelc, Perzanowski, and Jadacki. (shrink)

I CATEGORIES AND PRINCIPLES ii Introductory Remarks The value of linguistics as a cognitive science lies largely in its potential for providing insights ...

Why do speakers of all languages use different grammatical structures under different communicative circumstances to express the same idea? In this comprehensive study, Professor Lambrecht explores the relationship between the structure of sentences and the linguistic and extra-linguistic contexts in which they are used. His analysis is based on the observation that the structure of a sentence reflects a speaker's assumptions about the hearer's state of knowledge and consciousness at the time of the utterance. This relationship between speaker assumptions and (...) formal sentence structure is governed by rules and conventions of grammar, in a component called 'information structure'. Four independent but interrelated categories are analysed: presupposition and assertion, identifiability and activation, topic, and focus. (shrink)