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This groundbreaking book offers a new and compelling perspective on the structure of human language. The fundamental issue it addresses is the proper balance between syntax and semantics, between structure and derivation, and between rule systems and lexicon. It argues that the balance struck by mainstream generative grammar is wrong. It puts forward a new basis for syntactic theory, drawing on a wide range of frameworks, and charts new directions for research. In the past four decades, theories of syntactic structure have become more abstract, and syntactic derivations have become ever more complex. Peter Culicover and Ray Jackendoff trace this development through the history of contemporary syntactic theory, showing how much it has been driven by theory-internal rather than empirical considerations. They develop an alternative that is responsive to linguistic, cognitive, computational, and biological concerns. At the core of this alternative is the Simpler Syntax Hypothesis: the most explanatory syntactic theory is one that imputes the minimum structure necessary to mediate between phonology and meaning. A consequence of this hypothesis is a far richer mapping between syntax and semantics than is generally assumed. Through concrete analyses of numerous grammatical phenomena, some well studied and some new, the authors demonstrate the empirical and conceptual superiority of the Simpler Syntax approach. Simpler Syntax is addressed to linguists of all persuasions. It will also be of central interest to those concerned with language in psychology, human biology, evolution, computational science, and artificial intellige
This groundbreaking book offers a new and compelling perspective on the structure of human language. The fundamental issue it addresses is the proper balance between syntax and semantics, between structure and derivation, and between rule systems and lexicon. It argues that the balance struckby mainstream generative grammar is wrong. It puts forward a new basis for syntactic theory, drawing on a wide range of frameworks, and charts new directions for research. In the past four decades, theories of syntactic structure have become more abstract, and syntactic derivations have become ever more complex. Peter Culicover and Ray Jackendoff trace this development through the history of contemporary syntactic theory, showing how much it has been driven bytheory-internal rather than empirical considerations. They develop an alternative that is responsive to linguistic, cognitive, computational, and biological concerns. At the core of this alternative is the Simpler Syntax Hypothesis: the most explanatory syntactic theory is one that imputes the minimum structure necessary to mediate between phonology and meaning. A consequence of this hypothesis is a far richer mapping between syntax and semantics than isgenerally assumed. Through concrete analyses of numerous grammatical phenomena, some well studied and some new, the authors demonstrate the empirical and conceptual superiority of the Simpler Syntax approach.Simpler Syntax is addressed to linguists of all persuasions. It will also be of central interest to those concerned with language in psychology, human biology, evolution, computational science, and artificial intellige
This book brings together many of Peter Culicover's most significant observations on the nature of syntax and its place within the architecture of human language. Over four decades he has sought to understand the cognitive foundations of linguistic theory and the place of syntactic theory in explaining how language works. This has led him to specific proposals regarding the proper scope of syntactic theory and to a re-examination of the empirical basis of syntactic analyses, which reflect judgements reflecting not only linguistic competence but the complexity of the computations involved in acquiring and using language. After a brief a retrospective the author opens the book with the Simpler Syntax Hypothesis, an article written with Ray Jackendoff, that proposes significant restrictions on the scope of the syntactic component of the grammar. The work is then divided into parts concerned broadly with representations, structures, and computation. The chapters are provided with contextual headnotes and footnote references to subsequent work, but are otherwise printed essentially as they first appeared. Peter Culicover's lively and original perspectives on syntax and grammar will appeal to all theoretical linguists and their advanced students.
This book introduces the analysis of natural language within the broader question of how language works - of how people use languages to configure words and morphemes in order to express meanings. Its step-by-step account covers every aspect of syntax and includes exercises and suggestions for further reading throughout.
This book collects Peter Culicover's key observations on the nature of syntax and its place within the architecture of language. Over four decades his pioneering examinations of expression and interpretation have led him to rebalance the elements of grammar and to reformulate linguistic theory. The book will appeal to all theoretical linguists.
Discusses the relationship between Chomskyan syntactic theory and the evolution of language.
This volume collects papers that discuss theoretical or empirical problems from a multidimensional view of syntax and morphology, presupposing frameworks such as LFG, HPSG, the Parallel Architecture, or Integrational Linguistics, where syntactic and morphological objects are conceived as constructs with multiple, interrelated components.
This Handbook represents the development of research and the current level of knowledge in the fields of syntactic theory and syntax analysis. Syntax can look back to a long tradition. Especially in the last 50 years, however, the interaction between syntactic theory and syntactic analysis has led to a rapid increase in analyses and theoretical suggestions. This second edition of the Handbook on Syntax adopts a unifying perspective and therefore does not place the division of syntactic theory into several schools to the fore, but the increase in knowledge resulting from the fruitful argumentations between syntactic analysis and syntactic theory. It uses selected phenomena of individual languages and their cross-linguistic realizations to explain what syntactic analyses can do and at the same time to show in what respects syntactic theories differ from each other. It investigates how syntax is related to neighbouring disciplines and investigate the role of the interfaces especially the relationship between syntax and phonology, morphology, compositional semantics, pragmatics, and the lexicon. The phenomena chosen bring together renowned experts in syntax, and represent the consensus reached as to what has to be considered as an important as well as illustrative syntactic phenomenon. The phenomena discuss do not only serve to show syntactic analyses, but also to compare theoretical approaches with each other.
Even though the range of phenomena syntactic theories intend to account for is basically the same, the large number of current approaches to syntax shows how differently these phenomena can be interpreted, described, and explained. The goal of the volume is to probe into the question of how exactly these frameworks differ and what if anything they have in common.Descriptions of a sample of current approaches to syntax are presented by their major practitioners (Part I) followed by their metatheoretical underpinnings (Part II). Given that the goal is to facilitate a systematic comparison among the approaches, a checklist of issues was given to the contributors to address. The main headings are Data, Goals, Descriptive Tools, and Criteria for Evaluation. The chapters are structured uniformly allowing an item-by-item survey across the frameworks. The introduction lays out the parameters along which syntactic frameworks must be the same and how they may differ and a final paper draws some conclusions about similarities and differences.The volume is of interest to descriptive linguists, theoreticians of grammar, philosophers of science, and studies of the cognitive science of science.
In this book, Peter Culicover introduces the analysis of natural language within the broader question of how language works - of how people use languages to configure words and morphemes in order to express meanings. He focuses both on the syntactic and morphosyntactic devices that languages use, and on the conceptual structures that correspond to particular aspects of linguistic form. He seeks to explain linguistic forms and in the process to show how these correspond with meanings. The book's clear, step-by-step exposition is presented within the Simpler Syntax framework whose development has been led by the author and Ray Jackendoff over the last fifteen years. This integrates syntactic theory with the representation of conceptual structure and casts fresh light on the interface between syntax and semantics. It also enables elegant and economical analyses of natural language phenomena without recourse to such abstract devices as functional heads and uniform binary branching. Peter Culicover opens his account with an overview of the nature of language and the aims of its analysis. He then divides the book into parts devoted to syntactic categories, syntactic structure and argument structure, argument realization, unbounded dependencies, and clausal structure. He provides exercises, problems, and suggestions for further reading throughout the book.