Is There Life Beyond Generative Syntax? (original) (raw)

2000, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur (PBB)

This is the twenty-first volume in the valuable Blackwell Companion series of Handbooks in Linguistics, which since the late nineties has offered us insight into the state of the art of a wide range of subdisciplines within linguistics. 1 Most of these volumes are heavy tomes (usually about 800 to 900 pages), but this one caps them all with close to 4000 pages spread over five volumes (there is, however, some overlap, because the recommendations, contents, preface, index and to some extent the references are repeated in each volume). This enormous quantity is perhaps not surprising given that the study of syntax has been very much in the limelight since the Chomskyan 'revolution' in the 1960s, which shifted the centre of gravity in linguistics from the historical and mostly descriptive study of grammar -with language output or the 'performance' level firmly in a central position -to the development of a theoretical model, in which the speaker stands central; a model, in other words, in which the 'machinery' or the generation of sentences (i.e. 'competence') came to be seen as the object of study rather than the output itself. This, in turn, led to a strictly synchronic perspective being taken in grammar research. This change in perspective was important and useful at the time because it linked the study of linguistics to other scientific domains such as psychology, neurology, cognitive science etc., and to all the recent new interdisciplinary research connected with the workings of the brain. It has created renewed interest in language and has resulted in a whole range of theoretical linguistic models being developed, some of which were variants on the generative model, such as Lexical Functional Grammar (cf. Vincent 2001), Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (cf. Pollard and Sag 1994), and the more recent Jackendoff (2002) model, while others represented a reaction to the strictly formal model of generative grammar, resulting in the creation of 1 I would like to thank Mauro Scorretti for discussing the Italian agreement cases with me, and Robert Cloutier, Evelien Keizer, Willem Koopman, Martin Haspelmath, Hans Wank, and Franca Wesseling for their comments on and careful reading of an earlier draft.