Syntactic Nuts
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Syntactic Nuts
This book investigates the architecture of the language faculty by considering what the properties of language reveal about the mental abilities and processes involved in language acquisition. The language faculty, the author argues, must be able not only to accommodate what is general, exceptionless, and universal in language, but must also be capable of dealing with what is irregular, exceptional, and idiosyncratic. In Syntactic Nuts Peter Culicover shows that this is true not only of the lexicon, but for syntax. Marginal and exceptional cases, where there is no straightforward form-meaning correspondence, are dealt with by the language faculty easily and precisely as the general cases. In considering how and why this should be the author argues against the prevailing trend in generative grammar, which takes the learner as either incorporating maximally global generalisations as part of its innate capacity for language, or projecting global generalisations from a very limited input on the basis of innate mechanisms. He suggests that the learning mechanism does not generalize significantly beyond the evidence presented to it, and further that it seeks to form generalizations based on all and only the evidence presented to it. Syntactic Nuts makes a fundamental contribution to generative grammar and syntactic theory. It situates syntactic theory within cognitive science in a novel way. It contributes to an alternative, and yet in many ways traditional, perspective on the manner in which knowledge is represented and processed in the mind.
Explaining Syntax
Author: Peter W. Culicover
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Release Date: 2013-09
This book collects Peter Culicover's key observations on the nature of syntax and its place within the architecture of language. Over four decades his pioneering examinations of expression and interpretation have led him to rebalance the elements of grammar and to reformulate linguistic theory. The book will appeal to all theoretical linguists.
Deconstructing Syntactic Theory
Author: Peter W. Culicover
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2025-06-12
Deconstructing Syntactic Theory is a critical examination of the assumptions and methodologies of contemporary derivational syntactic theory. The study ranges from the earliest work inspired by Chomsky's Syntactic Structures and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax to the present-day Minimalist Program. The book begins with an examination of the relationship between syntactic structure, linear order, and meaning, and the role of uniformity, in motivating derivational analysis that assume movement and invisible structure. A central property of such analyses is that they are cryptoconstructional: construction-specific stipulations are assumed in order to derive the form and meaning of expressions. The second part looks at a range of technical and empirical problems of derivational syntax, which require theoretical stipulations and devices to properly constrain cryptoconstructional analyses. The focus is particularly on problems relating to movement and problems of invisibility. In Part III, the authors turn to the question of the independent justification of syntactic structure, arguing that much hierarchical structure is not only unnecessary, but also does not yield optimal analyses for a number of grammatical phenomena. Part IV focuses on the use of syntax to account for phenomena that are arguably not syntactic; it concludes that using syntax to model semantic phenomena is at best not necessary, and at worse empirically inadequate. Similarly, using syntax to model morphological relations works only for a narrow subset of cases and cannot be sustained more generally without causing significant internal problems. The book concludes with a review of minimalism, laying out aspects of the logic of the Minimalist Program, its assumptions, and their motivations and consequences. The authors argue that minimalism is best achieved by a leaner theory of linguistic representations, along the lines of the constructional architecture of Simpler Syntax, as proposed by Culicover and Jackendoff (2005).