Omer Preminger

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”

David Pesetsky recently posted Cilene Rodrigues’ response to Everett & Gibson’s "review" of the Recursion Across Domains book for the Linguistic Society of America (LSA)’s flagship journal, Language. I posted a comment there asking why we should support the LSA given that they publish things like the E&G "review."

The discussion thread in question devolved – and this was partially my fault – into a broader discussion of the pros and cons of the LSA as a professional organization, until David, rightly, asked that everyone shift focus back to the actual topic of his post.

In the interest of that, I thought I’d write some of my further thoughts on the LSA over here, rather than in the comments on David’s post. … [read more]

Here's a thing that I'm sure happens to everyone from time to time:

1. You read or hear about phenomenon X or generalization X or theoretical proposal X.
2. Time passes.
3. You happen upon some new data or a new idea, for which X proves relevant.
4. However, it turns out that you have imperfect recall of X. Unbeknownst to you, what you have in your head is actually some rejiggered version of X – let's call it X' – which conveniently-and-suspiciously suits your current theoretical or empirical needs. … [read more]