Abstract: Extract The articles collected here are all concerned in one way or another with a question that has engaged me ever since I began my study of natural language syntax: why does syntax have the properties that it has? In order to even attempt to imbue this question with empirical content, it is essential to determine what “syntax” is, and what its properties are. When I began the study of syntax as a graduate student in the 1960s, I thought I understood this, more or less, but as time has progressed, what seemed obvious or at least not to be disputed has become much less clear to me, and much more unstable. Some of the results of my attempts to reconstruct what “syntax” is, and what its properties are, at least for myself (and with my collaborators), are represented in this book. This book considers various aspects of what the proper domain of syntax is (“Representations”), how to properly characterize the syntax of a language (“Structures”), and reasons why some syntactic possibilities might be more likely to be encountered than others (“Computation”). Hence the title—Explaining Syntax: Representations, Structures and Computation.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-10-03
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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