Syntactic Nuts Hard Cases, Syntactic Theory, and Language Acquisition

by Culicover, Peter W.

• ISBN13: 9780198700234
• ISBN10: 0198700237
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-12-09
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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, whichtakes 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 beyondthe 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 andprocessed in the mind.

Author Biography

Peter W. Culicover is currently the Chair of the Department of Linguistics and Director of the Center for Cognitive Science at the Ohio State University.

Table of Contents

On the nature of linguistic explanation

Between learning and predetermination

Architecture of the learner

The theory of syntactic categories either, etc. for

Determiners and quantifiers

Odd prepositions

the the

Uniformity

Syntactic idiosyncrasies and the learner

Reductions Movements

Inflections

Other potential nuts

Brief mention

Generality and idiosyncrasy in grammar

Syntactic complexity

Consequences

Summary

References

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.