Syntactic Structures after 60 Years: The Impact of the Chomskyan Revolution in Linguistics

465 Pages·2018·17.59 MB·English

by  Hornstein

Norbert Hornstein, Howard Lasnik, Pritty Patel-Grosz, Charles Yang (Eds.)
Syntactic Structures after 60 Years
Studies in
Generative Grammar
Editors
Norbert Corver
Harry van der Hulst
Roumyana Pancheva
Founding editors
Jan Koster
Henk van Riemsdijk
Volume 129
Syntactic Structures
after 60 Years
Edited by
Norbert Hornstein
Howard Lasnik
Pritty Patel-Grosz
Charles Yang
ISBN 978-1-5015-1465-4
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-0692-5
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-0686-4
ISSN 0167-4331
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 1957, 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck
♾ Printed on acid-free paperr
Printed in Germany
www.degruyter.com
Contents
Part I: Syntactic Structures
Preface  5
Table of Contents   9
Part II: Syntactic Structures after 60 Years
Acknowledgements  121
Norbert Hornstein, Howard Lasnik, Pritty Patel-Grosz and Charles Yang
Introduction  123
Noam Chomsky
Syntactic Structures. Some retrospective comments   131
Howard Lasnik
Syntactic Structures: Formal Foundations   137
David Adger
The Autonomy of Syntax   153
Robert C. Berwick
Revolutionary New Ideas Appear Infrequently  177
Jon Sprouse
Acceptability judgments and grammaticality, prospects and challenges   195
Jeffrey Lidz
The explanatory power of linguistic theory   225
Heidi Harley
Kernel sentences, phrase structure grammars, and theta roles  241
Mamoru Saito
Transformations in the Quest for a Simpler, more Elegant Theory  255
2   Contents
Gillian Ramchand
Grammatical vs. Lexical Formatives   283
Bronwyn Moore Bjorkman
Syntactic Structures and Morphology  301
Henk C. van Riemsdijk
Constructions  317
Paul M. Pietroski
Meanings via Syntactic Structures  331
Omer Preminger
Back to the Future: Non-generation, filtration, and the heartbreak of interface-
driven minimalism  355
Mark Aronoff
English verbs in Syntactic Structures  381
Artemis Alexiadou, Elena Anagnostopoulou and Florian Schäfer
Passive  403
Martina Wiltschko
Discovering syntactic variation  427
Part I: Syntactic Structures

PREFACE
This study deals with syntactic structure both in the broad sense
(as opposed to semantics) and the narrow sense (as opposed to
phonemics and morphology). It forms part of an attempt to con­
struct a formalized general theory of linguistic structure and to
explore the foundations of such a theory. The search for rigorous
formulation in linguistics has a much more serious motivation than
mere concern for logical niceties or the desire to purify well-estab­
lished methods of linguistic analysis. Precisely constructed models
for linguistic structure can play an important role, both negative
and positive, in the process of discovery itself. By pushing a precise
but inadequate formulation to an unacceptable conclusion, we can
often expose the exact source of this inadequacy and, consequently,
gain a deeper understanding of the linguistic data. More positively,
a formalized theory may automatically provide solutions for many
problems other than those for which it was explicitly designed.
Obscure and intuition-bound notions can neither lead to absurd
conclusions nor provide new and correct ones, and hence they fail
to be useful in two important respects. I think that some of those
linguists who have questioned the value of precise and technical
development of linguistic theory may have failed to recognize the
productive potential in the method of rigorously stating a proposed
theory and applying it strictly to linguistic material with no attempt
to avoid unacceptable conclusions by ad hoc adjustments or loose
formulation. The results reported below were obtained by a
conscious attempt to follow this course systematically. Since this
fact may be obscured by the informality of the presentation, it is
important to emphasize it here.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501506925-009