Timeline for Theta Criterion Violation
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
17 events
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| Jan 25, 2019 at 17:30 | comment | added | abarnert | @amI In particular, how do you explain why "[the kid [that e was tall]]" doesn't end up marking both "kid" and "e", or why that isn't a problem, without getting into specific details that differ between different versions of GB? | |
| Jan 25, 2019 at 17:27 | comment | added | abarnert | @amI Why is it misleading? They're both relative clauses with "tall" as a predicate inside, and that's the part that's relevant here. The only difference is external (what's extracted from the CP). Using [that was tall] adds an extra complication that's not relevant to that part of the answer—different theories differ on how "kid" gets modified, and case marked, and so on—that I didn't want to get into. (Notice that in the last section, I do compare the adjective to a relative clause—once we're talking about the roles of phrases, it's a different story.) | |
| Jan 25, 2019 at 8:13 | comment | added | amI | Comparison with "I saw that the kid was tall" is misleading. A better comparison is with "I saw the kid that was tall." | |
| Jan 19, 2019 at 22:10 | comment | added | jlawler | Yeah, like I said, I never got into the angels and pinheads controversies. Like McCawley (whose syntactic theory, btw, I tend to follow), I'm a data fetishist. | |
| Jan 19, 2019 at 21:36 | comment | added | abarnert | @jlawler (Except, of course, that everyone knows GB is heresy, because it conflicts with MP, and MP makes language really really perfect instead of just perfect.) | |
| Jan 19, 2019 at 21:35 | comment | added | abarnert | @jlawler To be fair, it's not really a matter of religious orthodoxy; the principles are the only way to justify any explanation of anything, so you have to use them. Of course accepting GB in the first place, yeah, that's a matter of pure faith. But if you abandon that, you have to do things like building a working parser to demonstrate that something is plausibly parseable under their account, or predicting psycholinguistic test results. What kind of science is that? Real science is saying "these principles make language perfect, therefore they must be true". :) | |
| Jan 19, 2019 at 21:20 | comment | added | jlawler | Well, if one wants to accept and guard the sacred principles of GB, that's a matter between one and one's confessor. Me, I never converted. | |
| Jan 19, 2019 at 20:36 | comment | added | abarnert | @jlawler Well, the hard part isn't just coming up with a derivation, it's finding a way to motivate the movements under accepted principles of GB, or coming up with a new principle to motivate the movements and arguing that it must be part of UG. Presumably that's what took Napoli a whole book (and maybe it's also why her derivation wasn't more widely accepted, but that also might just be a matter of bad timing). | |
| Jan 19, 2019 at 17:46 | comment | added | jlawler | That's what GS did. But it wasn't railroad time yet. Maybe Schmerling's got a system that would work. Looks machine-washable, anyway. | |
| Jan 18, 2019 at 23:56 | comment | added | abarnert | @TsutsuT. All that being said: Given the well-known semantic equivalence (or at least parallels) between predication and attribution, a Chomskyan really should be looking for a way to reduce them to the same syntax at a deeper level, as Napoli apparently did. Otherwise they're leaving a major phenomenon unexplained—in fact, one that people like Sag and Culicover later picked up as one of their arguments for abandoning MP for a CxG-flavored generative approach like HPSG or Simpler Syntax. So, maybe this book is worth studying, even if it does turn out to be obsolete. | |
| Jan 18, 2019 at 23:34 | comment | added | abarnert | @TsutsuT. If you search for "theta grid in minimalist program", most of the first page of results are PDFs of what look like survey papers covering the alternatives to standard-GB theta theory that have turned out to be the most important in the long run. So maybe that's a good place to start (and you can follow their references to any specific theories you find interesting). | |
| Jan 18, 2019 at 23:28 | history | edited | abarnert | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jan 18, 2019 at 23:25 | comment | added | abarnert | @TsutsuT. Unless you're committed to rejecting the Minimalist Program and being a GB diehard, I'm not sure it's worth learning the various GB alternative argument structure theories, and especially not the ones from before UTAH and Larson shells became widely adopted. None of those old solutions work under MP, and meanwhile, there's an even wider variety of MP approaches to the problem to learn. And most of the papers expect you to know standard GB, but not any of the alternatives. (That's even mostly true for non-Chomskyan theories, especially the ones that are still called "generative".) | |
| Jan 18, 2019 at 10:21 | comment | added | Tsutsu | This is what I normally take as the standard analysis of GB, adunjtcs don't assign theta roles (Chomsky, 1981), Williams (1980)), but in her book (by the way, it's Napoli not Naoli, I apologise), she's building something different. Anyway, I come closer to the theta theory and I discover that there are many different views by linguists, but the standard belief in GB is that adjuncts don't assign theta roles. | |
| Jan 17, 2019 at 23:51 | history | edited | abarnert | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jan 17, 2019 at 23:23 | history | edited | abarnert | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jan 17, 2019 at 23:18 | history | answered | abarnert | CC BY-SA 4.0 |