Omer Preminger

Artemis Alexiadou & Uli Sauerland have put forth a proposal recently for an alternative view of generative grammar, which they term the Meaning First Approach (MFA). The animating idea behind MFA is that the grammar is fundamentally a “compression” mechanism, which maps between complex (i.e., hierarchical) structures of thought on the one hand, … [read more] “blogpost: There is no “meaning-first” alternative”

I was reading some comments by Dan Milway about Chomsky’s recent UCLA lectures, and I realized something I hadn’t noticed before: committing oneself to the brand of minimalism that Chomsky has been preaching lately means committing oneself to a fairly strong version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Here’s why. Consider … [read more] “blogpost: Noam Chomsky and Benjamin Lee Whorf walk into a bar…”

This is not so much a blog post as it is a collection of things that I think deserve your attention. As you will see, it is quite a self-serving list, in that several of these works provide evidence in favor of claims that I have also been arguing for. But hey, it's my blog, right? 😊 … [read more]

For the last ten years or so, Chomsky has been claiming increasingly often that the discrete bifurcation of expressions into “grammatical” and “ungrammatical” is incorrect. I think he is wrong, or at least that these claims are without any current basis. But before explaining why, it’s important to set some parameters of … [read more] “blogpost: On so-called “degrees of grammaticality””

I was recently invited to contribute a short piece about Agree to the This Or That Publisher’s Handbook of Minimalism [update: here‘s what I eventually wrote], 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 … [read more] “blogpost: Post-minimalism?”