Le Meur review Golub American Anthropologist 2015 (original) (raw)
Related papers
On Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
Inference: International Review of Science
In the first essay for a new series on landmark texts, Anna Maria Di Sciullo revisits Noam Chomsky’s classic Aspects on the Theory of Syntax. Published in 1965, Aspects was a revelation, presenting linguists with what, at once, became the Standard Theory. It promoted linguistics into a science, one that accepted the methods and the standards of the hard sciences themselves.
2004
The hypothesis of the autonomy of syntax makes special demands on one of the central issues in linguistic theory: the specification of correspondences between a lexical conceptual and syntactic structure. One strategy is to distinguish several layers of lexical representation and allow only one of them to be "visible" to syntactic and morphological processes (cf. Pinker 1989, Grimshaw 1990). A recent implementation of this strategy is the Aspectual Interface Hypothesis (AIH) advocated by Tenny since 1987. The AIH is driven by the assumption that there is a direct and uniform association between telicity, or what Tenny calls "aspectual measuring-out" of events, and the internal direct object argument in the d-structure.
Afterword: Nominalizations in syntactic theory
Lingua, 2011
This afterword constructs a working typology of nominalizations, based on but not restricted to the papers collected in this special issue. The typology is based on what we call the Functional Nominalization Thesis (FNT), a version of the model of “mixed projections” proposed in Borsley and Kornfilt (2000) which claims that nominal properties of a nominalization are contributed by a nominal functional projection; above that projection the structure has nominal properties, below it, verbal properties. We argue for four possible levels of nominalization, CP, TP, vP and VP. We show that certain internal syntactic phenomena are characteristic of different levels of nominalization: genitive subjects of nominalization at TP and below, genitive objects of nominalization at vP and below. We suggest that the inventory of categories implicated in nominalization is quite restricted: D, and nominal counterparts of ‘light’ verbal categories. We examine two alternatives to the FNT, the framework of Panagiotidis and Grohmann (2009) and Bresnan's (1997) head-sharing approach, and argue that our treatment is more appropriate under a minimalist approach, as it accommodates the facts within an independently motivated inventory of functional categories, without positing a special type of category limited only to nominalizations. We counter Bresnan's objections against a syntactic derivation of nominalizations by showing that a word's lexical integrity can be successfully violated by “suspended affixation” in syntactically derived nominalizations in Turkish while such integrity has to be respected in lexically derived nominalizations.