Omer Preminger

It’s been longer than usual since my last blog post. I’ve been busy with various research- and teaching-related activities, which I love dearly, but which have kept me away from blogging. But I’m back with a doozy, length-wise. So strap in… (Also, it’s worth pointing out that this post is an extended … [read more] “blogpost: Are individual syntactic terminals ever interpreted?”

From time to time, the term “ecological validity” is thrown around in connection with linguistic research. And you’d think I’d be calloused by now, but no: I’m astounded anew every time someone treats this as something that’s self-evidently desirable (and not, say, as anathema to how most science works). The term “ecological validity”, … [read more] “blogpost: “Ecological validity””

For a while now, I have been pondering the prospects of a realizational/interpretive theory in which spellout to PF and spellout to LF involve separate collections of rules, and where individual spellout rules crucially map from sets of syntactic terminals to exponents or to meaning primitives. (For a given spellout rule to be applicable, … [read more] “blogpost: Architecture and Blocking revisited”

Matushansky (2006) proposes to replace the head-adjunction mechanism of Government & Binding theory (call this “Theory1”) with a version that involves movement to a specifier position followed by “m-merger” of the specifier with the adjacent head (call this “Theory2”). One of the major selling points is supposed to be that Theory2 … [read more] “blogpost: On the “interleaving” of morphology & syntax”