Omer Preminger

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”

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]