Incorporation in Universal Grammar: a case study in theoretical reductionism

Abstract

Over the past three decades there has been a pervasive tendency in linguistic theorizing, especially in syntactic theory, towards theoretical reductionism; that is, theorists have attempted either to reduce complex phenomena to a single unitary phenomenon or to explain phenomena in terms of a small number of unifying principles of some kind. Reduction of complex phenomena or principles to simpler, better understood ones is a natural part of scientific explanation, but the danger in this course lies in 'overreduction' to the point where the phenomena or the principles become distorted; determining the correct reduction is an important consideration in explanatory scientific theories. The reduction of linguistic phenomena can be seen first in the reduction of the scope of linguistics from language to grammar (Chomsky, I 98 i) and, second, in the assumption of the autonomy of syntax. Complex semantic and pragmatic features of natural language are either excluded from the stipulated domain of linguistics or are treated as syntactic. A good example of this is the postulation of D-structure in Government-Binding (GB) theory and the initial stratum in Relational Grammar (RG) as a 'thematically pure' representation of the semantic argument structure of a verb. That is, semantic role distinctions are represented formally in syntactic structure by either structural configurations or grammatical relations, and rules affecting these arguments apply to their syntactic representations, thereby avoiding any direct reference to their semantic representations, which are often dispensed with altogether. The opposite of this is the Generative Semantics position, which maintained that