Elementary Syntactic Structures
Prospects of a Feature-Free Syntax
Published on 9. October 2014
Book
Hardback
222 pages
978-1-107-03409-9 (ISBN)
Description
Most syntacticians, no matter their theoretical persuasion, agree that features (types or categories) are the most important units of analysis. Within Chomskyan generative grammar, the importance of features has grown steadily and within minimalism, it can be said that everything depends on features. They are obstacles in any interdisciplinary investigation concerning the nature of language and it is hard to imagine a syntactic description that does not explore them. For the first time, this book turns grammar upside down and proposes a new model of syntax that is better suited for interdisciplinary interactions, and shows how syntax can proceed free of lexical influence. The empirical domain examined is vast, and all the fundamental units and properties of syntax (categories, parameters, Last Resort, labelling, and hierarchies) are rethought. Opening up new avenues of investigation, this book will be invaluable to researchers and students in syntactic theory, and linguistics more broadly.
Reviews / Votes
'To be a good biolinguist, one needs to be a serious anti-lexicalist. Cedric Boeckx proves it by bringing together the highlights of modern syntactic theorizing and biological thinking.' Koji Fujita, Kyoto University 'Cedric Boeckx presents a novel re-conceptualization of contemporary linguistic theory aimed at precipitating the Chomskyan vision of a reduction of linguistics to biology. His achievement is to simultaneously reduce the language-specific aspects of mankind's biological endowment for language to an evolutionarily plausible core while saving the data of current linguistics: providing a roadmap for reconstituting within a lexicon-free syntax the descriptive and explanatory results of linguistics over linguistic universals and language typologies. This impressive and compelling volume should foster informed dialog across the disciplines toward the goal of understanding how the human brain manages language.' Alec Marantz, New York UniversityMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
2 Tables, black and white; 3 Line drawings, black and white
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
479 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-107-03409-9 (9781107034099)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
08/2019
Cambridge University Press
€48.60
Shipment within 15-20 days
E-Book
10/2014
Cambridge University Press
€21.99
Available for download
E-Book
09/2014
1st Edition
Cambridge University Press
€85.99
Available for download
Person
Cedric Boeckx is Research Professor at ICREA (The Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies) and a member of the Department of Linguistics at Universitat de Barcelona.
Content
Preface; Abbreviations and symbols; 1. Biolinguistic concerns; 2. Syntactic order for free: merge ?; 3. Trusting in the external systems: descent with modification; 4. Elaborate grammatical structures: how (and where) to deal with variation; 5. Interdisciplinary prospects; Appendix 1. Deja vu all over again?; Appendix 2. Switching metaphors: from clocks to sandpiles; Appendix 3. More on the loss of syntactic variation; Bibliography; Index.