Government And Binding Research Articles

Examination of Verb and Verb Phrase in Boier Ahmadi Lori Based on X-bar Syntax

The big Chomskyan revolution took place by publication of Syntactic structures in 1957 but it evolved gradually during the time. In Syntactic structures, Chomsky introduced a grammar known as Generative Transformational Grammar which has many branches. One of its branches is Government and Binding theory / GB theory, sometimes called ‘Principle-and- parameters Theory’, also has some branches. One of its branches is ‘X-bar syntax’. It seems that X-bar syntax is able to describe verb and verb phrase in Boier Ahmadi Lori adequately. So, a free conversation of Boier Ahmadi Lori's informant was recorded. Then all of its simple sentences were analyzed based on X-bar syntax. The research comes up with this conclusion that X-bar syntax is not adequate enough to justify all characteristics of the verb and verb phrase in Boier Ahmadi Lori language.

Las oraciones medias: Un argumento a favor de la estructura conceptual

Middle sentences in English are only partly described within the Government and Binding theory. Some semantic and discourse generalizations which are integral to the meaning of these constructions are just set aside, if they are mentioned at all. The theory of conceptual semantics developed by Ray Jackendoff (1983, 1987, 1990) presents the first viable alternative to the syntactic strategies descending from Chomsky's theory. In this paper I will examine the middle voice and show how several Government and Binding analyses of these constructions fail to account for important parts of the data. I hope to persuade the reader that a conceptual structure analysis of this phenomenon provides a more appealing solution which fully integrates generalizations. the syntactic and semantic

One-replacement and the label-less theory of adjuncts

The proper treatment of adjuncts has been a central issue in syntactic theory since the 1980s. In the X'-theoretic analysis in the Government and Binding (GB) Theory (Chomsky 1981, 1986), they were commonly treated as optional elements attached to an intermediate or maximal projection of the head they modify. However, this treatment has been shown to be no longer tenable in the more recent Bare Phrase Structure (BPS) Theory for several conceptual reasons (Chomsky 1995: ch. 4), which renders the status of adjuncts all the more puzzling. Recently, however, Hornstein and Nunes (2008) (henceforth H&N) have proposed a new theory of adjuncts that conforms to the precepts of the BPS. It proposes that adjuncts need not be labeled for purposes of syntactic computation in contrast to complements and specifiers, which require the result of concatenation to be labeled. This squib presents new evidence for H&N's theory fromone-replacement.

Predicting the Acid/Base Behavior of Proteins: A Constant-pH Monte Carlo Approach with Generalized Born Solvent

The acid/base properties of proteins are essential in biochemistry, and proton binding is a valuable reporter on electrostatic interactions. We propose a constant-pH Monte Carlo strategy to compute protonation free energies and pK(a)'s. The solvent is described implicitly, through a generalized Born model. The electronic polarizability and backbone motions of the protein are included through the protein dielectric constant. Side chain motions are described explicitly, by the Monte Carlo scheme. An efficient computational algorithm is described, which allows us to treat the fluctuating shape of the protein/solvent boundary in a way that is numerically exact (within the GB framework); this contrasts with several previous constant-pH approaches. For a test set of six proteins and 78 titratable groups, the model performs well, with an rms error of 1.2 pH units. While this is slightly greater than a simple Null model (rms error of 1.1) and a fully empirical model (rms error of 0.9), it is obtained using physically meaningful model parameters, including a low protein dielectric of four. Importantly, similar performance is obtained for side chains with large and small pK(a) shifts (relative to a standard model compound). The titration curve slopes and the conformations sampled are reasonable. Several directions to improve the method further are discussed.

The Left Periphery: The Interaction of Syntax, Pragmatics, and Prosody in Czech (review)

Reviewed by: The Left Periphery: The Interaction of Syntax, Pragmatics, and Prosody in Czech Ivona Kučerová Anne Sturgeon. The Left Periphery: The interaction of syntax, pragmatics, and prosody in Czech. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2008. 143 pp. [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 129.] This monograph, based on the author's doctoral dissertation, provides a novel investigation of various types of left dislocation strategies in Czech, in particular Contrastive Left Dislocation (CLD) and two varieties of Hanging Topic Left Dislocation (HTLD). The aim is to fill a gap in the description of this phenomenon in the West Slavic languages. While left dislocation has been widely discussed in the Chomskyan generative tradition for the Romance and Germanic languages, relatively little has been written about Czech. The author provides an exhaustive description of the data and shows how the data may be analyzed within the current state-of-the-art approaches to Germanic left dislocation. Even though Czech left dislocation strategies have not been the subject of much Chomskyan generative investigation, they have not gone unnoticed in the Czech functionalist tradition of the Prague linguistic circle. One of the main virtues of the monograph, apart from its empirical contribution, is the fact that it brings the results of functionalist approaches to the attention of the Chomskyan reader. Chapter 1 opens the monograph by sketching the phenomenon and the analysis to be proposed. The structure of the left periphery in Czech, a necessary background for the proposal, is investigated in chapter 2. Sturgeon closely follows the analysis of Czech sentential structure that is proposed in Veselovská 1995. Veselovská's analysis was developed within the GB framework, and her treatment of Czech is rather conservative in the sense that Czech sentential structure does not crucially differ from the sentential structure of English. Sturgeon recasts Veselovská's result within the Minimalist Program and examines the validity of Veselovská's assumptions. Interestingly, Sturgeon disagrees with Veselovská's analysis with respect to the relative height of elements in the left periphery. While for Veselovská a significant number of dislocations related to information structure target the CP area, Sturgeon argues that there is no empirical need to posit an expanded [End Page 143] CP domain. An analysis that puts the landing site of Focus, Contrastive Topic, and Topic elements within an expanded IP will do as well. 1. The proposed structure of the left periphery (p. 20, sturgeon's (25)): Two assumptions are crucial here: (i) movement to Spec IP may be triggered by the EPP, and (ii) A-bar movement may be discourse motivated, and therefore does not need to target a feature-specific A-bar position, such as Topic Phrase or Focus Phrase, Consequently, the specifier of IP may be either an A- or an A-bar position. In showing that (1) is an appropriate analysis of Czech, Sturgeon relies on Lenertová (2001), who noticed that in Czech multiple wh-movement does not target the CP area, since clitics and adverbials may appear between the wh-elements, as witnessed by (2) (p, 26, Sturgeon's (39)). The data lend further support to the analysis of multiple wh-movement in West Slavic as proposed in Meyer 2003, 2004. [End Page 144] 2. Kde jsi (včera večer) koho (včera večer) komu where AUX2sg last night whoacc last night whodat představila? introduced 'Where did you introduce who to whom last night?' Lit: 'Where (last night) who (last night) to who introduced?' Chapter 3 investigates the syntax of left dislocation. In her analysis, Sturgeon closely follows the proposal of Grohmann (2003) for German. Sturgeon argues that Czech, like German, has three distinct left dislocation strategies: Contrastive Left Dislocation (CLD), as in (3), and two varieties of Hanging Topic Left Dislocation (HTLD), as exemplified in (4) and (5). 3. Ostatně toho draka, toho by si mohl jedině besides that dragoruacc thatacc cond3sg REFL could so only namalovat. drawinf 'Besides, that dragon, he would only be able to draw it…' (Czech National Corpus) 4. Anička? Té se nic nestalo. Aničkanom thatdat REFL nothing NEG-happened 'Anička? Nothing happened to her.' (Czech National Corpus) 5...

The grammar of raising and control: A course in syntactic argumentation (review)

Reviewed by: The grammar of raising and control: A course in syntactic argumentation Ida Toivonen The grammar of raising and control: A course in syntactic argumentation. By William D. Davies and Stanley Dubinsky. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Pp. xi, 383. ISBN 0631233024. $45.95. The phenomena of raising and control have, together and separately, been the topic of a very large number of publications within the general school of thought that we call generative grammar. In The grammar of raising and control: A course in syntactic argumentation, William D. Davies and Stanley Dubinsky guide the reader through the various analyses of raising and control that have been proposed from standard theory up until the present. The book consists of thirteen chapters, which are organized in four units, as well as author and subject indices. Unit 1, 'Classic transformational grammar', contains five chapters. Ch. 1 is a short introduction to raising and control, including an overview of the classic tests by which the phenomena can be teased apart. Already in this chapter, D&D point out that the picture is not as neat and tidy as it first may seem: evidence from French, first presented by Ruwet (1991), serves to illustrate that it is not always possible to appeal to syntactic diagnostics to identify and distinguish between raising and control. Ch. 2 introduces standard theory and presents Robert Lees's and Peter Rosenbaum's analyses of raising. Ch. 3 discusses Paul Postal's (1974) book, On raising, which is perhaps the most important and most comprehensive work to date on raising. In Ch. 4, we are introduced to Noam Chomsky's extended standard theory, which eliminates raising-to-object. Extended standard theory also replaces the notion of a deleted equivalent NP with a base-generated 'controlled' PRO. As Postal's book contains a number of arguments for raising-to-object, Chs. 3 and 4 give the reader insight into an exciting exchange of views. The [End Page 880] excitement is turned up a notch or two in Ch. 5, where the 'On raising' debates are covered. Bresnan takes the extended standard theory position that the infinitival subject stays in situ in so-called raising-to-object constructions. Postal responds. Bach points to a third possibility: it is actually possible that the NP in question is base-generated in the matrix object position. In Unit 2, 'Extensions and reinterpretations of standard theory', D&D draw our attention to the array of new approaches to syntax that emerged in the 1970s. The two chapters included in the unit specifically focus on David Perlmutter and Postal's relational grammar (Ch. 6) and Chomsky's revised extended standard theory (Ch. 7). The basic formal mechanisms and theoretical assumptions are presented, and it is also explained how raising and control are analyzed in the respective frameworks. The treatments of raising-to-object illustrate the formal differences as well as the differences in theoretical assumptions between relational grammar and revised extended standard theory. Relational grammar of course does not adopt the formal mechanism of movement, but nevertheless assumes that the 1 ('subject') of the embedded clause ascends to hold a 2-relation ('object' relation) in the matrix clause. In revised extended standard theory, as in extended standard theory, no movement is assumed: the deep subject is the surface subject in raising-to-object. Much research within relational grammar focuses on the discovery and formulation of universal principles that identify and restrict certain phenomena (in particular, relation-changing operations) crosslinguistically. Universal principles similarly become the focus in the principles-and-parameters (P&P) framework within transformational grammar, which is the topic of Unit 3, 'Government and binding theory'. Unit 3 contains three chapters. Ch. 8 introduces Chomsky's government and binding (GB) model and the exceptional case marking (ECM) account of raising-to-object. Within GB, it is assumed that every NP must be assigned (abstract) case, according to certain restrictions on what a potential case assigner is and how case can be assigned. Under the ECM account of raising-to-object, the matrix verb 'exceptionally' assigns accusative case to the embedded subject across a clause boundary. Ch. 9 discusses the limited success of applying an ECM analysis...

<i>Possible and probable languages: A generative perspective on linguistic typology</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Possible and probable languages: A generative perspective on linguistic typology Marco Nicolis Frederick J. Newmeyer. 2005. Possible and probable languages: A generative perspective on linguistic typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. x + 278. US $45.00 (softcover). The stated goal of the book is “reorienting generative grammarians in a direction that is better able to capture the distinction between the possible and the probable in language” (p. 27). To achieve this, the author does not present new research results of his own, but offers a detailed critique of the dominant functionalist and formalist approaches to typological generalizations and parametric correlations. In a nutshell, Newmeyer argues that both “formalist approaches”, in particular the Principles and Parameters model (Chapter 3) and “functionalist approaches” (Chapter 5), spectacularly fail when it comes to accounting for typological generalizations. Their nonabsolute, stochastic nature leads the author to propose that their explanation does not lie in the realm of grammatical theory (p. 104), but rather in a theory of performance, such as the one put forward in Hawkins (2004). Newmeyer’s Universal Grammar is thus far lighter that what is assumed in most generativist studies: “UG tells us what a possible human language is, but not what a probable language is” (p. 104). This catchy sentence essentially amounts to discarding parametric theory as part of the generative enterprise. This is precisely the goal of Chapter 3 of the present book, as we will see below. Chapter 2 offers a very interesting, highly accessible and well-documented historical overview of mainly the GB and MP models, as well as Kayne’s Antisymmetry. Several views of what constitutes a “parameter” are clearly presented (e.g., Baker’s macroparameters and Kayne’s microparameters) and examples of several parameters are given (pp. 42ff.), including Rizzi’s Subjacency Parameter, the Null Subject Parameter, and the Head Directionality Parameter. The author concludes: “the commitment of generativists to account for cross-linguistic variation was greatly facilitated by the introduction of the Government-Binding theory in the early 1980s and its conception that principles are parametrized” (p. 72). Despite that conclusion, Newmeyer, at the outset of Chapter 3, sketches out the components of his own conception of linguistic theory as follows (taken from p. 73): (1) Notice that (1b) refers to the kind of language specific rules characterizing the EST model. By Newmeyer’s own admission, the Principles and Parameters model had “greatly facilitated” the emergence of accounts of cross-linguistic variation, so it is hardly obvious why something along the lines of (1b) benefits a theory aiming at characterizing typological generalizations and crosslinguistic variation. Perhaps aware of the problem, the author defines these language-specific rules quite cryptically, as follows: “Essentially, they are parameter-settings ‘detached’ from the parameters themselves (which are hypothesized not to exist)” (p. 74). Furthermore, Newmeyer’s arguments against Parametric Theory appear questionable and have been harshly criticized within the generativist community (see Holmberg and Roberts (2005) for a detailed and thorough critique of Newmeyer’s arguments). Given the strict space limits of this review, I will limit myself to pointing out a couple of inadequacies in Newmeyer’s account of Parametric Theory. First, the author explicitly assumes that parameters have a “putatively rich deductive structure” (p. 45). This has never been the standard idea in the field (with the possible exception of Baker (2001)). Rizzi (2004) argues in fact that “Parameters have virtually no internal structure, certainly no inherent deductive structure: they are simple binary choice points as elementary and easy to fix as possible. The deductive structure has to do with the interaction of parameters with the rest of the structure of UG, the system of principles, not with their inner constitution” (p. 333). Second, due partly to this conception of parameters, Newmeyer considers Gilligan’s (1987) survey on null subject phenomena in one hundred languages as damning for theories of pro-drop such as Rizzi’s (1982), so much so that the conclusion of the discussion is that “the Null Subject Parameter is no more” (p. 92). Such conclusion is far too pessimistic. While the author correctly observes that “five language types are attested whose existence neither theory [i.e., Rizzi’s and Safir’s...

EPP Extensions

The fact that the specifier of T0 is subject both to the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) and to the Empty Category Principle (ECP) has remained an unexplained accident within Government-Binding Theory. I propose a principled account of this correlation. The EPP is a selectional requirement of functional heads (e.g., T, Top, C) that applies at PF—an instance of p-selection for an overt element. Like all selectional requirements, it applies to the head of the selected phrase, explaining why null heads cannot appear in EPP positions (thus deriving certain representational ECP effects). A wide range of empirical results follow, all unified by the exclusion of null-headed phrases from EPP positions: subject-object asymmetries in the distribution of bare nouns in Romance and sentential complements; failure of certain adjuncts to occur in clause-initial position; resistance of indirect objects to Ā-movement; and phonological doubling of heads of fronted categories. I argue against the agreement/checking view of the EPP and show that only the selectional construal allows a natural explanation of its puzzling properties.

Prolegomenon to a Theory of Argument Structure (review)

Reviewed by: Prolegomenon to a theory of argument structure by Ken Hale, Samuel Jay Keyser Kleanthes K. Grohmann Prolegomenon to a theory of argument structure. By Ken Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser. (Linguistic Inquiry monograph 39.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Pp. x, 281. ISBN 0262582147. $28. For those who are familiar with Ken Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser’s previous collaborative work, it was probably just a matter of time before the extremely influential ideas espoused in Hale & Keyser 1993, among others, were made more explicit, refined a little, and presented collectively in a monograph. But this book goes well beyond that. In addition to laying out the general framework at length and revising parts of previous analyses, this monograph contains new, follow-up work—the culmination of eighteen years of collaborative research, as the reader learns in the ‘Preface’ (ix–x), from the inauguration of the MIT Lexicon Project in 1983 to H’s untimely death. Ch. 1 presents ‘The basic elements of argument structure’ (1–27) and constitutes a considerable update of the research program reported in Hale & Keyser 1993. The guiding intuition H&K pursue in their search for a theory of argument structure is to look closely at ‘the syntactic configurations projected by a lexical item’ (1), their definition of argument structure, yielding a syntactic process of derivational morphology (and beyond). Motivation for doing so comes from the desire to find an answer to the question of why there are so few thematic roles, such as ‘agent’, ‘theme’, or ‘goal’. Theta theory, as conceived in the principles-and-parameters framework (and government-binding theory in particular), may have something to say about how argument structure is licensed qua thematic roles—but it has rather little to say about why there are only two or three thematic roles and not, say, twenty-three. ‘Bound features, Merge, and transitivity alternations’ (29–45) are the concerns of Ch. 2, which explores further the implications of the limited types of argument structure in language, namely that argument structure needs more than just complement and specifier relations (see below for a brief exposé on H&K’s structural assumptions). By integrating recent views of the operation Merge (Chomsky 1995, 2000), H&K update their previous account of verbs like put or smear (cf. *Spurs put on Leecil, *Saddle soap smeared on my chaps) in that the complement of this verbal head is not some full predicative projection of P with a specifier, but the result of simple Merge between this P and its complement (in previous X-bar-theoretic terms, P′). This type of argument structure yields the well-formed We put spurs on Leecil and Leecil smeared saddle soap on my chaps. A theory of ‘Conflation’ (47–103)—the ‘fusion of syntactic nuclei’ (47)—is presented in Ch. 3. Similar in spirit to incorporation, conflation differs in at least one important aspect: ‘a verb cannot “conflate” with the specifier of its complement’ (103), because conflation, due to its selectional nature, is a strictly local relation between a verb and the head of its complement. (Incorporation, by contrast, does allow the configuration of a specifier incorporating into the next higher head.) The empirically rich Ch. 4 deals with ‘A Native American perspective’ (105–57) on argument structure. As H&K humbly put it, the ‘purpose [of this chapter] is merely to lend a certain degree of cross-linguistic perspective to this work’ (105). H&K discuss mainly the transitivity alternation in four ‘Native American linguistic traditions’ (105), the genetically and/or a really quite different languages Navajo (an Athabaskan language), Ulwa (Misumalpan), Tohono O’odham (aka Papago), and Hopi (both of which are Uto-Aztecan). The remainder of the book deals with interesting extensions of the system. For example, H& K’s approach also has something to say ‘On the double object construction’ (159–88), going beyond the initial remarks in Hale & Keyser 1993, which they discuss in Ch. 5. The complex structure argued for is essentially one that takes a recursive, fully selecting, predicative head (i.e. a head that selects for both a specifier and a complement) to be the complement of a head that only selects for...

On Nature and Language, and: The Language Organ: Linguistics as Cognitive Physiology, and: Language in a Darwinian Perspective (review)

Reviewed by: On nature and language by Noam Chomsky, and: The language organ: Linguistics as cognitive physiology by Stephen R. Anderson, David W. Lightfoot, and: Language in a Darwinian perspective by Bernard H. Bichakjian Frederick J. Newmeyer On nature and language. By Noam Chomsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 206. ISBN: 0521815487. $60.00. The language organ: Linguistics as cognitive physiology. By Stephen R. Anderson and David W. Lightfoot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 263. ISBN: 0521809940. $65.00. Language in a Darwinian perspective. By Bernard H. Bichakjian. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Pp. 316. ISBN: 0820454583. $47.95. 1. Introduction The three books under review share a biological approach to language. Chomsky’s On nature and language (ONL) advocates ‘studying language as a natural object, a cognitive capacity that is part of the biological endowment of our species, physically represented in the human brain and accessible to study within the guidelines of the natural sciences’ (ix). The goal of The language organ (TLO) by Anderson and Lightfoot is to ‘establish for the non-specialist the biological nature of the language faculty’ (xiv). And the ‘central idea’ of Bichakjian’s Language in a Darwinian perspective (LDP) is that ‘every linguistic feature, be it a speech sound, a grammatical marker, or a syntactic strategy, interfaces with a neuro-muscular algorithm, and that selection pressures have steadily guided languages toward alternatives that are ever more functional in their linguistic use and ever more economical in their neuro-muscular production and cerebral processing’ (x). As might be expected, Chomsky and Anderson and Lightfoot agree on most of the fundamental issues, though one finds surprising metatheoretical and methodological differences. Bichakjian’s approach, biological though it may be, stands in sharp contrast in many respects to that taken in the other two books. ONL is edited by Adriana Belletti and Luigi Rizzi. Oddly, however, their names do not appear on the book’s cover. Nevertheless, Ch. 1 (1–44) was written by them and is entitled ‘Editor’s introduction: Some concepts and issues in linguistic theory’. After reaffirming the basics of the ‘Chomskyan’ program, they go on to devote twenty pages to justifying the need for parameterized principles, illustrated for the most part by analyses from the later years of the government and binding (GB) theory. The final fourteen pages of Ch. 1 introduce the minimalist program (MP), stressing representational and derivational economy and appealing to the need to eliminate uninterpretable features as a justification for movement. Chs. 2 and 3, ‘Perspectives on language and mind’ (45–60) and ‘Language and the brain’ (61–91) respectively, are the published versions of lectures that Chomsky gave in Italy in 1999. Both are essays on the history and philosophy of science, raising the question of whether principles of cognition might be unified with those governing the physical world. Chomsky feels that such unification is a ‘distant goal; . . . for the present the study of language and other higher human mental faculties is proceeding much as chemistry did, seeking to “establish a rich body of doctrine,” with an eye to eventual unification, but without any clear idea of how this might take place’ (56). Ch. 3 is devoted to discussing and detailing three ‘generally reasonable’ theses: first, that minds are emergent properties of brains; second, that to fully understand some trait (including language), our perspective should be mechanistic, [End Page 583] ontogenetic, functional, and phylogenetic; third, that the functional organization of the brain is modular, incorporating ‘specialized organs’ (64). Ch. 4, the heart of ONL, is ‘An interview on minimalism’ (92–161), in which Chomsky replies to questions posed by Belletti and Rizzi about the goals, internal structure, and achievements of the MP. This chapter and the three that precede it assert that, as a result of this program, ‘it has become possible to pose in a productive way the question of the “perfection of language”: specifically, to ask how closely human language approaches an optimal solution to design conditions that the system must meet to be usable at all’ (58). Ch. 5, ‘The secular priesthood and the perils of democracy’ (162–86), develops one of Chomsky’s familiar political themes, namely, that intellectuals have tended...

Comparative Scandinavian syntax circa 1980–2000

This article offers an overview of comparative syntactic research covering the Scandinavian languages in the last couple of decades. Most of this research has been conducted within Principles-and-Parameters theory, mostly its Government-Binding phase, and a brief outline of theoretical developments in the 70’s leading up GB theory is included. Comparative Scandinavian syntax research is exemplified both by studies contrasting Scandinavian languages as a whole with English, by studies examining contrasts between Insular and Mainland Scandinavian, and finally with regard to some internal Mainland Scandinavian differences.

Exquisite connections: some remarks on the evolution of linguistic theory

This article discusses the motivation for the shift from GB theory to the Minimalist Program. It explores notions of economy and conceptual naturalness in linguistics and the physical sciences — in particular, symmetries across levels of analysis. As an example of such symmetries, it proposes a new analysis for some Principle C effects. It concludes with some observations on the conduct of science.

The overloading of Northern Sotho prepositions

This paper disproves Doke's (1957) view that there are no prepositions in Bantu languages. Scholars like Lombard et. al.(1985) and Louwrens (1991) say nothing about the preposition, but instead talk about particles. This paper seeks to look at the preposition from another perspective. It presents an argument that the particle is an umbrella term, which can justifiably be called a convenient term, a term used to refer to elements that don't clearly enter any class of lexical items. Taking into consideration the functions performed by prepositions, it will be a great injustice to classify them as particles. Within the GB theory, prepositions are assignors of case and theta role, and, traditionally, they do not have phi-features such as gender, number and person, which participate in agreement. To regard prepositions as particles seems to be a linguistic fallacy. It is argued in this paper that what seem like particles are in fact genuine prepositions in the traditional sense. The paper acknowledges and indicates that there are few prepositions in Northern Sotho and this results in their overloading with meanings.

Ab initio GB study of prebiotic synthesis of purine precursors from aqueous hydrogen cyanide: dimerization reaction of HCN in aqueous solution

Ab initio MO GB theory which includes the continuum model of solvent effect using generalized Born formula has been applied to the dimerization reaction of HCN in aqueous solution which is the starting step in prebiotic synthesis of purine precursors from aqueous hydrogen cyanide. Three steps considered were: (i) the reaction of HCN and H 2O to produce the CN − anion, (ii) the reaction of CN − with HCN to give the NC–CHN − anion, and (iii) the addition of a proton to the anion to give iminoacetonitrile. The formation of CN − ion from HCN in aqueous solution requires 15.1 kcal/mol (the experimental value estimated from the dissociation constant of HCN in water is 14.8 kcal/mol). The reaction of CN − with HCN requires the activation energy of 32.2 kcal/mol (MP2/6-31++G ∗∗//HF/6-31++G ∗∗) to give the dimer. This barrier height is reduced to 26.1 kcal/mol when HCN is associated with H 3O +. In the presence of NH 3 in aqueous solution, CN − is produced easily by the reaction of HCN and NH 3 with a low activation energy of 4.3 kcal/mol. It was shown that the formation of CN − becomes easier in ammoniacal solution, and the dimerization occurs efficiently in aqueous solutions which contain NH 3.

Compounding by adjunction and its empirical consequences

Three options present themselves for generating compound words within classical generative theory from Chomsky (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995) up to and including GB Theory (Chomsky, Lectures on Government and Binding. Foris, Dordrecht, 1981): they can be base-generated, they can be generated by movement rules or they can be generated by lexical rules. Incorporation, for example, according to Baker (Incorporation: a Theory of Grammatical Function Changing, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1988), forms compound words by movement rules. Jackendoff (Morphological and semantic regularities in the lexicon. Language 51, 639–671,1975) among many others adopts a lexicalist account of compounding where lexical rules are used to filter out redundant, i.e. rule-governed aspects of the representation of structurally complex lexical items. Here it is proposed that compounds are base-generated following Liberman and Sproat (The stress and structure of modified noun phrases in English. In: Sag, I.A., Szabolcsi, A. (Eds.), Lexical Matters. CSLI, Stanford, pp. 131–181,1992). It will be shown that significant properties of compounds, perhaps all linguistically significant properties, follow from their being generated by adjunction to X° either by movement or D-structure adjunction. This entails specifically that there can be no phrasal compounds and no synthetic compounds.

Back to the future

Andrew Radford, Syntactic theory and the structure of English: a minimalist approach. Cambridge textbooks in linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997. Pp. xii + 558. Hardback £50, US$69.95, ISBN 0 521 47125 7; paperback £16.95, US$24.95, ISBN 0 521 47707 7.Until recently I was convinced that by far the best textbook ever written on Generative Grammar was Perlmutter and Soames' Syntactic argumentation and the structure of English (1979). Unfortunately, the theory advanced there died out. As concerns its successor, namely GB-theory, I still believe that Andrew Radford's pioneering Transformational syntax (1981) is one of the best introductions to Chomsky's Pisa lectures, despite the plethora of competing textbooks that have appeared over the years. Now that Radford has presented his most recent book, Syntactic theory and the structure of English, I am inclined to believe that it should be considered a competitor to Perlmutter and Soames' book. Not only the similarity to Perlmutter and Soames' title, but also the pedagogical and systematic orientation of the new book invites comparison. As both books meet the highest standards with regard to clarity of expression and exposition, I recommend Radford's book as the best textbook for up-to-date syntactic theory, and I am convinced that it will play the same influential role as an introduction to the Minimalist theory as did the 1981 book for GB theory.

On the opacity of clausal constituents

Clausal constituents of sentences present analytical difficulties in terms of both their distribution and their ability to determine syntactic relationships. This study proposes a typology of these constituents based on their differing syntactic and semantic properties and corresponding distinctions involving question formation. Contrary to the claims of government-binding theory, the analysis presented here argues that the data can ultimately be accounted for by an appeal to the semantic rather than simply the syntactic properties of these constituents.

Verbflexion und funktionale Kategorien im Französischen

It is argued that the standard analysis of French finite and infinite clauses in the GB framework by means of two movement operations (V-raising and I-lowering) as well as Pollock's (1989) approach based on the split-Infl-hypothesis cannot be maintained because of serious conceptual defects, relating particularly to the concepts of functional category, head movement, and basic syntactic unit. An alternative non-transformational analysis is proposed which covers the same range of data as Pollock 1989. The new analysis is based on the following assumptions: (i) Only those functional elements may be said to belong to PS categories whose realizations combine with other syntactic elements in a purely concatenative way; these categories are unable to project to higher bar levels by themselves. (ii) No syntactic category Infl can be said to exist in French. (iii) French inflected verbs are inserted as syntactic atoms in D-structure, their syntactic category being given by the feature specification [+V, -N, ±finite]; participles have the category given as [+V], i.e. they are unspecified for [±N] or [±finite]. (iv) Non-lexical categorial specifications such as [±finite] or [±negation] are co-projected to higher bar levels together with the lexical categorial feature specifications [±N] and [±V]; this process involves unification of the categorial specifications making up the node labels of an adjunction-like subtree. (v) Syntactic atoms (lacking any bar specification) must be distinguished from zero bar projections; only the latter may dominate amalgams of syntactic atoms. What is usually called head movement must be split into Move-X and Move-X°; X-movement (if it exists) can only be tantamount to moving a syntactic atom of category X into an empty X position: it never yields a Chomsky adjunction. (vi) Predicate modifiers adjoin to verbal projections of bar level zero or one, never to maximal verbal projections (i.e. clauses). (vii) In French nominative Case is assig

The LAD goes to school: a cautionary tale for nativists

Linguistics is supposed to be the study of linguistic competence. The sentences used by linguists to illustrate their arguments are presumably structures that can be generated by the rules that make up the native speaker's competence. Therefore, all normal native speakers should in principle be capable of processing them. In this study, adult respondents of various educational backgrounds were presented with a series of test sentences based on examples drawn from recent publications in the GB framework. The test was carefully designed to minimize the effects of extrinsic factors such as memory limitations and lapses of attention. It was found that performance increased dramatically with educational achievement, with the least-educated respondents consistently obtaining very low scores. An analysis of the patterns of answers given by respondents of various educational backgrounds revealed that the least-educated speakers were also the most likely to ignore syntactic cues and rely on nonlinguistic strategies in interpreting the test sentences. Thus, the results suggest that the ability to deal with the carefully edited, highly syntacticized structures that one encounters in publications dealing with language is acquired in the course of formal education and is far from universal. This in turn raises doubts about the traditional logical argument for innateness

Parameters of Slavic Morphosyntax

This is the first linguistic study written within the Principles and Parameters framework to deal with the Slavic languages. Franks develops parametric solutions to related constructions among those languages. The book can serve both as an introduction to Government and Binding (GB) Theory for Slavic linguists as well as an introduction to Slavic languages for scholars of syntax.