I was recently invited to contribute a short piece about Agree to the This Or That Publisher’s Handbook of Minimalism, and it made me wonder to what extent I, or really most other generative syntacticians who got their PhDs after about 2005 or so, can be considered to still be doing “minimalism.” […]
At the polite urging of the particle linguist, I have been thinking about adding a blogroll to my site. (As keen observers will discern, this urging is about a year old now… Better late than never!) As the particle linguist points out, this is standard practice in other blogospheres, and it strikes me as just plain good online citizenship. […]
Ever since Phase Theory was first put forth by Chomsky, it has been taken for granted that phases include at least CP and transitive vP (or whatever you think the highest projection in a transitive verb phrase is). More recently, Keine (2017) has presented a very nice argument that vPs, even transitive ones, cannot be phases, at least not in Hindi. […]
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. [...]
I just got home from Oslo, where I had many really interesting interactions with several linguists. One of them was a conversation with fellow visitor Jonathan Bobaljik. We were talking about the relatively well-known observation that for many alleged “syntax-semantics mapping phenomena,” the expected mappings only go through if the syntax independently allows at least two different configurations. As Jonathan helpfully points out, this is an observation that goes back to Grice, if not Jespersen. But just because an observation is “old,” we shouldn’t overlook the consequences it has for contemporary syn-sem theories. And the consequences are very interesting. […]
Here's a thing that I'm sure happens to everyone from time to time:
This is a post about listedness: what is the nature of the idiosyncratic information that is listed in the grammar.
In traditional, lexicalist approaches, the listed atoms were lexical items. A lexical item contained, at minimum, a phonological form, a semantic interpretation, [...]
The =&0=& is conceptual. As
already discussed on this blog […]
A while ago, I posted the following on facebook:
"the morning star" is to "the evening star" as
"my analysis resorts to expletive pro" is to "my analysis is wrong"
To illustrate [...]
Evidence for Phonologically-Influenced Choice of Syntactic Structure […]