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A Minimalist Theory of Simplest Merge
This collection explicates one of the core ideas underpinning Minimalist theory – explanation via simplification – and its role in shaping some of the latest developments within this framework, specifically the simplest Merge hypothesis and the reduction of syntactic phenomena to third factor considerations. Bringing together recent papers on the topic by Epstein, Kitahara, and Seely, with one by Epstein, Seely and Obata, and one by Kitahara, the book begins with an introduction which situates the papers in a cohesive overview of some of the latest research on Minimalism, as facilitated by current theoretical developments. The volume integrates a historical overview of evolutions in Merg...
Contrastive Analysis of Chinese and English Syntax
This book introduces a contrastive analysis of Chinese and English syntax based on generative grammar. It covers major syntactic domains, including but not limited to noun phrases, verb phrases, the inflectional domain, the discourse-related domain and ellipsis. Based on the empirical data drawn from both Chinese and English, and recast in modern linguistic terminology, the book introduces various rules and theoretical modules from the generative framework to analyze the similarities and differences between Chinese and English syntax. The chapters are arranged such that the book moves from the easiest syntactic topics gradually towards the more complex and advanced ones. Each chapter includes a short summary of major points and references for further reading. Readers are not required to have background knowledge in syntax. The book can serve as a textbook or a reference book for scholars of Chinese studies, Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (TCFL), Chinese linguistics, comparative linguistics and theoretical linguistics.
Deconstructing Syntactic Theory
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. ...
Mereological Syntax
An argument for replacing Chomsky’s set-theoretic Merge view of syntax with a theory of syntax based on mereological objects. Mereology is the study of parthood—what it means for one thing to be part of another. David Adger argues that a theory of syntax based on mereological objects should replace Chomsky’s set-theoretic Merge view of syntax. He shows how this new perspective solves some of the problems that have bedeviled minimalism, while opening a path to a unified approach to islands, one of the central topics in theoretical syntax for the past 50 years. Adger draws on data from across many languages and from experimental work. Adger focuses on two puzzles—specifically, the so-c...
Generative Grammar's Grave Foundational Errors
This work examines Noam Chomsky's widely accepted ontological assumptions, now referred to as “biolinguistics”—and demonstrates that they are internally inconsistent. Notably, it is shown that Chomsky himself has at least once admitted this flaw. Additionally, the volume challenges a fundamental assumption from Chomsky’s 1950s linguistic writings. This is the claim that the grammars of natural languages, particularly of English, must be constructive (proof-theoretic) devices, usually called generative grammars. It is shown that this persistent view cannot in principal account for a multitude of linguistic structures realized as perfectly natural sentences. Finally, the work scrutinizes Chomsky’s frequent assertion that “there is essentially only one language spoken on Earth,” revealing it to have no actual substance. The exposition of these flaws calls for a reassessment of fundamental aspects of generative linguistics.
Mathematical Structure of Syntactic Merge
A mathematical formalization of Chomsky’s theory of Merge in generative linguistics. The Minimalist Program advanced by Noam Chomsky thirty years ago, focusing on the biological nature of human language, has played a central role in our modern understanding of syntax. One key to this program is the notion that the hierarchical structure of human language syntax consists of a single operation Merge. For the first time, Mathematical Structure of Syntactic Merge presents a complete and precise mathematical formalization of Chomsky’s most recent theory of Merge. It both furnishes a new way to explore Merge’s important linguistic implications clearly while also laying to rest any fears that...
Locative Predications in Chadic Languages
This book demonstrates that the grammatical systems of individual languages encode unique semantic structures. Zygmunt Frajzyngier examines these semantic structures with particular reference to how languages convey information about the location of an entity or an event and the movements of an entity in space, drawing on data from eight typologically distinct languages that belong to three branches of the Chadic family. These languages were chosen because some display locative expressions with semantic and syntactic characteristics that have not been observed or described in other languages, most importantly in the coding of what Frajzyngier calls 'the locative domain' in the grammatical system. The volume shows that utterances in a given language are determined by the functions encoded in the grammatical system and by where those functions are encoded; it further shows that syntactic properties and the existence of some lexical items in the language are also determined by those same functions.
