Omer Preminger

Here is a paper by Canaan Breiss and Bruce Hayes (I will refer to the paper as B&H). To offer a brief summary of B&H’s main empirical point, it shows that the choice of syntactic ‘structure’ (i.e., both the choice of terminals and their arrangement) is probabilistically biased towards avoiding phonotactically problematic sequences (e.g. a sequence of two consecutive sibilants), even when the sequence in question arises across a word boundary. It does so by focusing on a series of well-established phonological constraints (from work on word‑level phonology), and showing that word‑bigrams whose juncture violates these constraints are underattested. This is shown to be the case in a variety of corpora, both written and spoken. Let’s refer to this as Evidence for Phonologically-Influenced Choice of Syntactic Structure, or EPICSS for short. […]  [read more]

Here’s a nice little thing to ponder. Suppose syntactic computation is bound by some cyclic domains – we can call them “phases” (though I am on record with the opinion that phase theory is a faded facsimile of Subjacency, and many of its more recent developments, a faded facsimile of Barriers). And suppose that we encounter a configuration like (1) in which H is able to access XP but unable to access YP, where XP and YP both seem, as far as we can tell, featurally suited to H’s needs: […]  [read more]

There is a rather persistent confusion in current linguistic literature that I would like to highlight, between what syntax is (the component of grammar responsible for those computations that are not reducible to sound and to meaning) vs. what syntax looks like (constituents, phrases, complementation, specifiers, c-command, etc.). […]  [read more]

There are several reasons why I started my own blog, after blogging over on Norbert Hornstein’s Faculty of Language (FoL) for a while. One of them is that I found the thematic content of my posts was actually not a terribly good fit for FoL. Norbert is very interested in big-picture cogsci and bio-cognitive themes. I love little morphemes and what makes them (syntactically) tick. These themes obviously make contact with one another, but I sometimes felt like an entomologist at a geophysicists convention. […]  [read more]

A large portion of my interests lately has centered around the proposition that syntactic theory has been overprivileging semantic argumentation. I’ve talked a lot, and in various forums, about why I think this is bad for syntax. Here, I’d like to say a bit about why I think this is bad for semantics. […]  [read more]