The Edge of Linguistics lecture series from Prof. Fredreck J. Newmeyer During Oct 7 to Oct 17, Prof. Newmeyer offered a lecture series on a wide range of linguistic topics in Beijing Language and Culture University. Lecture 1: The Chomskyan Revolution Lecture 2: Constraining the Theory Lecture 3: The Boundary between Syntax and Semantics Lecture 4: The Boundary between Competence and Performance Lecture 5: Can One Language Be ‘More Complex’ Than Another? Background: Fredreck J. Newmeyer is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Washington and adjunct professor in the University Of British Columbia Department Of Linguistics and the Simon Fraser University Department of Linguistics. He has published widely in theoretical and English syntax.

1. Class 3:
The Boundary between Syntax
and Semantics
1
FREDERICK J . NEWMEYER
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, UNIVERSITY
OF BRITISH COLUMBIA,
AND SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY

2. THE NATURE OF MEANING
2
 This class will deal with meaning/semantics and its
treatment within generative grammar.
 Many debates both within generative grammar and
between generativists and those in other frameworks
have centred around questions of semantics.
 To make things more complicated, there has always
been debate about what meaning ‘means’.

3. THE NATURE OF MEANING
3
Three approaches to meaning, each
of which is at root incompatible
with the other two.
Nevertheless, each has found its
place in current theoretical work:

4. THE NATURE OF MEANING
4
 FIRST: Meanings are ‘ideas’ or in current
terminology, ‘cognitive representations’.
 This has its roots in continental philosophy and was
developed by European structuralism.
 For Saussure the basic unit of linguistics was the
‘sign’: the relationship between a ‘mental image’ and
an ‘acoustic image’.

5. THE NATURE OF MEANING
5
 Ray Jackendoff’s Conceptual Semantics is a variant
of this idea.
 In Cognitive Linguistics, this is the approach to
meaning taken.
 Today in generative grammar, we see it in such
notions as ‘thematic roles’, ‘interpretable features’,
and so on.

6. THE NATURE OF MEANING
6
 SECOND: Meanings are ‘uses’.
 This has its roots in behaviourism, ordinary language
philosophy, and British structuralism.
 “If you want to know what a word/sentence, etc. means,
then see how it is used.”
 The use-theory of meaning manifests itself today in
pragmatic theory (based on work by such philosophers as
Grice, Austin, and Searle).

7. THE NATURE OF MEANING
7
 THIRD: Meanings are conditions for establishing the
truth of propositions.
 This has its roots in the logical tradition, in
particular in logical positivist philosophy.
 Today we see it in mainstream semantic theory.
 Interestingly, Chomsky has always rejected this
approach.

8. THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN FORM AND
MEANING
8
 Most of the debates in the past 50 years have focused on
the boundary between form and meaning.
 That is, questions like ‘Is it productive to study form
independently of meaning?’
 ‘To what extent does syntax have its own patterning that
does not reflect meaning?’
 One can go a long way to answering these questions
without knowing a lot about the nature of meaning.

9. THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN FORM AND
MEANING
9
 Chomsky in Syntactic Structures took a very clear
position on the form-meaning relationship:
“I think that we are forced to conclude that
grammar is autonomous and independent of
meaning.” (Chomsky 1957: 17)
 In other words, you can and should study form
without studying meaning at the same time.

10. THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN FORM AND
MEANING
10
 Chomsky gave empirical arguments for the independence
of form and meaning:
 Something can be formally grammatical, but have no
meaning: Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
 Two sentences can be related by a transformational rule,
yet differ in meaning:
Everyone in the room speaks two languages.
Two languages are spoken by everyone in the room.

11. THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN FORM AND
MEANING
11
 Chomsky also argued that we can use form to get at meaning:
‘In general, as syntactic description becomes deeper, what
appear to be semantic questions fall increasingly within
its scope...’ (Chomsky 1964: 936).
 For example, Chomsky motivated the passive transformation
purely on its formal properties (the occurrence of the
morpheme be+en, its limitation to transitive verbs, and so
on).
 The rough paraphrase relation between actives and passives
was not one of Chomsky’s motivations.

12. THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN FORM AND
MEANING
12
 There was no semantic component in Syntactic
Structures.
 Incorporating semantics into the model was the
work of the next decade.
 It was carried out by Jerrold Katz, Jerry Fodor, and
Paul Postal.

13. THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN FORM AND
MEANING
13
 Katz and Postal (1964): An Integrated Theory of
Linguistic Descriptions.
 The Katz-Postal Hypothesis: Transformations do not
change meaning.
 Another way to put that is to say that everything that
you need for semantic interpretation is at the level
of Deep Structure.

14. THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN FORM AND
MEANING
14
 But what about?:
Everyone in the room speaks two languages.
Two languages are spoken by everyone in the room.
 Isn’t this an example of Passive changing meaning?
 Katz and Postal argued that both sentences are
ambiguous!

15. THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN FORM AND
MEANING
15
 In the earliest work, John saw Mary, John did not see
Mary, and Did John see Mary? were all derived from the
same underlying structure.
 So transformations were certainly changing meaning!
 Katz and Postal agued that negatives and questions had
abstract NEG and Q morphemes in Deep Structure.
 So meaning was not changed under transformation.

16. THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN FORM AND
MEANING
16
 All of these changes laid the basis for Chomsky’s
1965 book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.
 This book proposed what came to be called the
‘Standard Theory’.

17. THE 1965 ASPECTS OF THE THEORY OF
SYNTAX MODEL, THE ‘STANDARD THEORY’
17

18. TOWARDS GENERATIVE SEMANTICS
 But in the late 1960s, generative syntacticians split
off in two directions:
GENERATIVE
SEMANTICS
INTERPRETIVE
SEMANTICS
18

19. TOWARDS GENERATIVE SEMANTICS
19
 For almost 10 years, the battles between the two
were so vitriolic, the period has been called the time
of the ‘linguistic wars’.

20. SOME LEADING GENERATIVE
SEMANTICISTS
GEORGE LAKOFF
HAJ ROSS
20
PAUL POSTAL
JAMES MCCAWLEY
1938-1999

21. TOWARDS GENERATIVE SEMANTICS
21
 By 1965-1967, Postal, Ross, and Lakoff were arguing
that deep structure was much more ‘abstract’ than in
the standard theory.
 In this sense, ‘abstract’ means farther from surface
structure and closer to semantic representation.

22. ‘Floyd broke the glass’ in the Standard Theory
22
Now look at the same sentence in a generative semantics treatment.

23. 23

24. TOWARDS GENERATIVE SEMANTICS
24
 Notice the lexical decomposition in the tree:
The verb break is derived from (roughly) 'cause +
come about + be + broken'.

25. GENERATIVE SEMANTICS
25
 By 1970 Generative Semantics was born.
 Deep Structure had been ‘pushed back’ so closely to
semantic representation that Lakoff, Ross, Postal,
and McCawley came to the conclusion that there was
no independent level of Deep Structure at all.

26. TOWARDS GENERATIVE
SEMANTICS
26

27. GENERATIVE SEMANTICS
27
 Generative Semantics did not at first seem like a big
departure from the standard theory.
 Their arguments were arrived at almost entirely by
recourse to the assumptions of Katz and Postal's
Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions and
Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.

28. GENERATIVE SEMANTICS
28
 The Katz-Postal Hypothesis:
 Transformations do not change meaning =
everything you need for meaning is at the level of
Deep Structure.
 That hypothesis invited a syntactic solution to every
semantic problem.

29. GENERATIVE SEMANTICS
29
 James McCawley pointed out that words can have
the same meaning as phrases:
 kill = cause to die
 McCawley reasoned that if they have the same
meaning, they should have the same syntactic
structure. So:

30. GENERATIVE SEMANTICS
30

31. LATE GENERATIVE SEMANTICS
31
 By 1970 Generative Semantics was at its peak.
 If it had stabilized there, it might exist today.
 But it did not stabilize. It kept adding more and
more new types of data to account for and more
complex devices to handle them.

32. LATE GENERATIVE SEMANTICS
32
 Needless to say, generative semanticists gave up on
formalism very quickly.
 By the mid 1970s, the program of Generative
Semantics held very little appeal for most linguists.
 The great majority went over to a more ‘Chomskyan’
way of looking at grammar.

33. FORM-MEANING MISMATCHES
33
• During the interpretive-generative semantics debate
more and more evidence was put forward for the
autonomy of syntax.
• Let’s look at some of this and then turn to
mainstream developments.
• Virtually every linguist in the world agrees that the
relationship between form and meaning is highly
systematic.

34. FORM-MEANING MISMATCHES
34
Almost all linguists agree that the match up between
form and meaning is far from one-to-one.
 Ambiguity (The chickens are ready to eat).
 Paraphrase (Mary looked up the answer /
Mary looked the answer up)

35. FORM-MEANING MISMATCHES
35
Lexical peculiarities:
a. He is likely to be late.
b. *He is probable to be late. (likely, but not probable, allows
raising)
a. He allowed the rope to go slack.
b. *He let the rope to go slack. (let doesn’t take infinitive
marker)
a. He isn’t sufficiently tall.
b. *He isn’t enough tall. / He isn’t tall enough. (enough is only
degree modifier that occurs post-adjectivally)

36. FORM-MEANING MISMATCHES
36
One grammatical relation encoding more than
one semantic role:
a. Mary threw the ball [‘Mary’ is the Agent of the action]
b. Mary saw the play [‘Mary’ is the Experiencer of an event]
c. Mary received a letter [‘Mary’ is the goal/recipient of
transfer]
d. Mary went from Vancouver to Montréal [‘Mary’ is an
object undergoing transfer of position]
In each case Mary is the grammatical subject.

37. FORM-MEANING MISMATCHES
37
Categorial mismatches — where the same concept is
encoded by different grammatical categories:
Quantificational nouns and quantifiers:
Bill has [a lot of] friends.
Bill has [many] friends.

38. FORM-MEANING MISMATCHES
Displacements — frontings and
extrapositions — that break up
what are clearly semantic units:
a. [Many objections to the new work rules]
were raised.
b. [Many objections] were raised [to the new
work rules].
38

39. WHY DO FORM AND MEANING DIVERGE?
39
 Pure historical accident:
Most disyllabic adjectives in English beginning with unstressed a- do not
occur prenominally:
*the asleep baby, *the aslant window, *the ajar door, *the atilt picture, etc.
There is no semantic generalization at work:
the sleeping baby, the slanted window, the open door, the titled picture
The generalization is not phonological either:
the abrupt remark, the acerb comment, the astute recommendation

40. WHY DO FORM AND MEANING DIVERGE?
40
The story: Most of the adjectives that don’t occur prenominally are
historically grammaticalizations of PPs:
asleep < on sleep; awake < on wake; ajar < at jar
They don’t occur prenominally because PPs don’t occur prenominally.
Abrupt, acerb, and astute, on the other hand, have different histories:
abrupt (< Lat. abruptus); acerb (< acerbity < Fr. acerbité); astute (< Lat.
astutus)
Given their history, there was never an impediment to abrupt, acerb, and
astute occurring prenominally.

41. WHY DO FORM AND MEANING DIVERGE?
41
 Real-time constraints imposed by the vocal channel
(Chafe 1967)
 Conflicting pressures (Martinet 1962)
Fronting an object highlights the fronted element, but breaks
up a semantic unit:
a. What did you eat?
b. Raw potatoes, I would never eat.
Pressure from the parser:
a. [Many objections to the new work rules] were raised.
b. [Many objections] were raised [to the new work rules].

42. THE AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX
42
What kinds of facts bear on whether syntax is
autonomous?
An answer from some formalists: ‘Just show a
mismatch between form and meaning/function’.
But if that’s all there were to it, then every linguist
would believe in autonomous syntax.

43. THE AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX
43
 We’ve just seen examples of mismatches.
 Some functionalists say that to refute the
autonommy of syntax, all that you need to do is to
show that there is a rule-governed relationship
between form and meaning.

44. THE AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX
44
DORIS PAYNE
“Crucial evidence for choosing a
functionalist over a Chomskyan
formalist approach would
minimally be any language in
which there is a rule-governed
relationship between
discourse/cognitive functions
and linear order, where the
relationship between form and
function is rule-like. Such
languages clearly exist.”

45. THE AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX
45
Parts of speech:
a. Nouns tend to denote persons, places, things,
or concepts.
b. Verbs tend to denote actions, processes, etc.
c. And so on for other syntactic categories.

46. THE AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX
46
All formal theories posit a rule-governed relation
between syntactic and semantic structure.
There would be no ‘autonomous syntacticians’ if, in
order to qualify as one, you had to reject regular
rules linking form and meaning.

47. SUPPORT FOR THE AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX
47
What does support the autonomy of syntax, then?
Autonomy of Syntax: The rules (principles,
constraints, etc.) that determine the combinatorial
possibilities of the formal elements of a language
make no reference to constructs from meaning,
discourse, or language use.

48. SUPPORT FOR THE AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX
To establish the correctness of the
autonomy of syntax, one must
demonstrate that:
a. there exists an extensive set of purely formal
generalizations orthogonal to generalizations governing
meaning or discourse.
FoG1 FoG2 FoG3 FoG4 FoG5 etc. (FoG = Formal
Generalization)
48

49. SUPPORT FOR THE AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX
49
b. these generalizations ‘interlock’ in a system.

50. THE AUTONOMY OF GRAMMATICAL
COMPONENTS
50
The adjective with infinitival complement structure in English
Noun – Copula – Adjective -- Infinitive
There are six logically possible ways that the NP subject can relate (in terms of
understood grammatical relations ) to the Adjective and the Verb. All six
occur:
Relation of NP subject to A to V
a. Mary is eager to please subject subject
b. Mary is easy to please none object
c. Mary is liable to dance none subject
d Guns are cheap to buy subject object
e. It is useless to try none none
f. It is (too) dark to see subject none

51. THE AUTONOMY OF GRAMMATICAL
COMPONENTS
51
 Clearly there is something ‘real’ about that
pattern itself, whatever meanings or uses it
might manifest.
 In other words, the formal patterns
themselves have an autonomy, not derivable
from meaning or use.

52. STRUCTURAL-SYSTEMIC PRESSURE ON
CHANGE
52
 Preposition-stranding:
a. Who did you talk to?
b. Mary was talked to.

53. STRUCTURAL-SYSTEMIC PRESSURE ON
CHANGE
53
 Despite its typological rarity, P-stranding in English
has expanded its domain consistently in the last 1000
years.
 Chronology of the expansion of P-stranding in English:
 a. Old English period (all wh-movement type
operations without an overt wh-pronoun;
topicalization)
 b. Early Middle English (overt wh-movement)
 c. Later Middle English (passives)
 d. Modern English (over a direct object; e.g.
Who did they take advantage of?; Mary was taken
advantage of.)

54. STRUCTURAL-SYSTEMIC PRESSURE ON
CHANGE
54
 What is going on here?
 An existing grammatical structure has steadily
expanded its domain.
 Speakers have the pattern and seem to love it.
 They use it in more and more contexts.

55. STRUCTURAL-SYSTEMIC PRESSURE ON
CHANGE
55
 Perhaps the expansion is due to the model of
other P-final structures in English:
 a. Phrasal verbs with postposed particles:
i. I looked the answer up.
ii. Let’s check it out.
 b. Final P-like directional particles:
i. I found this lying around.
ii. She’s coming up (e.g. the stairs)

56. STRUCTURAL-SYSTEMIC PRESSURE ON
CHANGE
56
 In other words — P-stranding has been reinforced
by the existence of similar — but analytically
independent — structures in the language.
 This ‘sensitivity to pure structure’ is predicted by the
autonomy of syntax.

57. THE WEAKENING OF THE AUTONOMY OF
SYNTAX
57
 The autonomy of syntax has become
progressive weakened over the years in
mainstream ‘Chomskyan’ syntax.
 The result is that syntax has been pushed
back to semantics — similar to what
happened with Generative Semantics!

58. THE WEAKENING OF THE AUTONOMY OF
SYNTAX
58
 The Theta-Criterion
from Chomsky’s
Lectures on
Government and
Binding (Chomsky
1981).

59. THE WEAKENING OF THE AUTONOMY OF
SYNTAX
 The Theta-Criterion:
59
 Each argument bears one and only one Q-role and
each Q-role is assigned to one and only one
argument. (Chomsky 1981: 36)

60. THE WEAKENING OF THE AUTONOMY OF
SYNTAX
60
 The Theta-Criterion demands abstract PRO subjects
where they do not occur on the surface:
a) Mary yearns [PRO to convince John that she is
qualified].
b) John left the room [PRO angry].

61. THE WEAKENING OF THE AUTONOMY OF
SYNTAX
61
 Next step: The idea that ‘c-selection
(essentially
subcategorization) is derivable
from ‘s-selection’ (essentially, the
thematic properties of the items
involved) (Chomsky 1986).

62. THE WEAKENING OF THE AUTONOMY OF
SYNTAX
62
 C-selection (subcategorization): the categories that
an verb takes at the level of D(eep)-structure:
persuade ___ NP CP
 S-selection: the semantic roles that a verb takes:
persuade Agent ___ Patient Proposition

63. THE WEAKENING OF THE AUTONOMY OF
SYNTAX
63
Getting rid of subcategorization is
tantamount to removing one piece
of motivation for an independent
level of D(eep)-Structure.

64. THE WEAKENING OF THE AUTONOMY OF
SYNTAX
64
 It is not obviously correct to try to derive c-selection
from s-selection:
Eat ___ (NP)
Dine ___ (on NP)
Devour ___ NP

65. THE WEAKENING OF THE AUTONOMY OF
SYNTAX
 The next step: Uniformity of Theta
Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH)
(Baker 1988).
 Identical thematic relationships
between items are represented by
identical structural relationships
between those items at the level of
D-structure.
MARK BAKER
65

66. THE WEAKENING OF THE AUTONOMY OF
SYNTAX
66
 UTAH is another step in the direction of Generative
Semantics. Notice how the subjects of each of these
sentences have different thematic roles:
Mary threw the ball [‘Mary’ is the Agent of the action]
Mary saw the play [‘Mary’is the Experiencer of an event]
Mary received a letter [‘Mary’is the recipient of an object]
Mary went from Chicago to Detroit [‘Mary’ is an object undergoing
transfer of position]
Mary underwent torture [‘Mary’ is a Patient]

67. THE WEAKENING OF THE AUTONOMY OF
SYNTAX
67
 Under one interpretation of UTAH, in each of these
sentences Mary would have to be in a different
structural position.

68. THE WEAKENING OF THE AUTONOMY OF
SYNTAX
68
 Next: Lexical decomposition, which derives semantically
complex predicates via syntactic movement operations.
KEN HALE, 1934-2001 JAY KEYSER HAGIT BORER

69. THE WEAKENING OF THE AUTONOMY OF
SYNTAX
69
 Next: The cartography program (Rizzi 1997; Cinque
1999), which appeals in part to semantic motivation
for syntactic projections:
LUIGI RIZZI GUGLIELMO CINQUE

70. THE WEAKENING OF THE AUTONOMY OF
SYNTAX
70
 “In fact, a restrictive theory should force a one-to-one
relation between position and interpretation (p. 20) …
each projection has a specific semantic
interpretation.” (p. 132) (Cinque 1999)

71. 71

72. THE WEAKENING OF THE AUTONOMY OF
SYNTAX
72
 Next: The triggering of movement (and/or the
licensing of configurations) by semantic properties of
heads (Rizzi 1991/1996; Haegeman 1995):
LUIGI RIZZI LILIANE HAEGEMAN

73. THE WEAKENING OF THE AUTONOMY OF
SYNTAX
73
“Syntactic movement … must be triggered by the
satisfaction of certain quasi-morphological
requirements of heads. … [S]uch features have an
interpretive import (Wh, Neg, Top, Foc, …): they
determine the interpretation of the category bearing
them and of its immediate constituents …, function
as scope markers for phrases with the relevant
quantificational force in a local configuration, etc.”
(Rizzi 1997: 282; emphasis added)
“[The Negative Criterion appeals to] the semantic-syntactic
feature NEG.” (Haegeman 1997: 116)

74. THE WEAKENING OF THE AUTONOMY OF
SYNTAX
74
 g. The principle of Full Interpretation: Every
element of Phonological Form and Logical Form
must receive an appropriate interpretation.
 h. Phases, which are defined as full propositional
structures.

75. THE WEAKENING OF THE AUTONOMY OF
SYNTAX
75
 These do not illustrate syntax becoming deeper and
incorporating semantics.
They illustrate grafting semantic notions directly
into the syntax.
 There are negative consequences — I’ll just give one
example.

76. NEGATION AND AUTONOMY
76
Crosslinguistically we also find the positing of
semantically-based projections that render purely
formal generalization all but impossible to capture.
Take the Neg Phrase projection. The default
assumption now is that where we have semantic
negation we have NegP.

77. NEGATION AND AUTONOMY
 Two possibilities:
77
 Negative markers cross-linguistically have their own distinct
syntax, i. e., as part of Neg Phrase.
 Negative markers cross-linguistically pattern with elements
that have nothing to do with negation.
 It’s the second possibility — the one
supporting autonomy — that is correct.

78. NEGATION AND AUTONOMY
78
Negation is almost never overtly phrasal.
 Even worse, NegP obscures the formal similarities
between negatives in a particular language and other
categories with the same formal properties (different
for different languages).

79. NEGATION AND AUTONOMY
79
1. Complement-taking verb
Tongan
a. Na’e ‘alu ‘a Siale
ASP go ABSOLUTE Charlie
‘Charlie went’
b. Na’e ‘ikai [S ke ‘alu ‘a Siale]
ASP NEG ASP go ABSOLUTE Charlie
‘Charlie did not go’
‘ikai behaves like a verb in the seem class (we know there is a
complement because ke occurs only in embedded clauses)

80. NEGATION AND AUTONOMY
80
2. Auxiliary
Estonian
Negative forms pattern with perfects, which are based
on a form of the copula OLEMA

81. NEGATION AND AUTONOMY
3. Derivational affix
Turkish
81
V + Refl + Recip + Cause + Pass + Neg + Possible +
Tense/Mood + Person/Number

82. NEGATION AND AUTONOMY
4. Noun
Evenki (Tungus)
82
a. nuan a:cin‘he is not here’
b. nuartin a:cir ‘they are not here’
(a:cin has a plural form and takes case endings like
ordinary nouns)

83. NEGATION AND AUTONOMY
5. Adverb
83
English
Not is an adverb in the same class as never, always,
just, barely.
We need the filter *not before a finite verb
to block *Mary not left, etc.

84. NEGATION AND AUTONOMY
84
In other words, negation
supports the autonomy of syntax.

85. THE MINIMALIST PROGRAM AND THE
AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX
85
Why has the autonomy of
syntax come to be so
weakened?

86. THE MINIMALIST PROGRAM AND THE
AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX
86
Partly the Minimalist Program is to
blame.
Three hypothesis central to the MP
have pushed syntax back towards
semantics.

87. THE MINIMALIST PROGRAM AND THE
AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX
 The three hypotheses:
87
a. There is no optionality in grammar; hence elements
move only when they are ‘required to’. (Chomsky
1995)
b. Movement must be triggered by a feature on a
functional head. (Chomsky 1995)
c. “In a perfectly designed language, each feature
would be semantic or phonetic, not merely a
device to create a position or to facilitate
computation.” (Chomsky 2000: 109)

88. THE MINIMALIST PROGRAM AND THE
AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX
88
(a) There is no optionality in grammar; hence elements
move only when they are ‘required to’. (Chomsky 1995)
 This hypothesis requires that seemingly optional variants
have different underlying structures.
 But few if any structural variants have the same semantic
properties.
 So structural differences came to be located in
projections with direct semantic relevance.

89. THE MINIMALIST PROGRAM AND THE
AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX
89
(b) Movement must be triggered by a feature on a
functional head. (Chomsky 1995)
 If projections are semantically defined and, as in (b),
movement is triggered by features of projections,
then we are a step closer to the idea that movement
is semantically motivated.

90. THE MINIMALIST PROGRAM AND THE
AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX
90
The quote in (c) is the icing on the cake:
“In a perfectly designed language, each feature
would be semantic or phonetic, not merely a device
to create a position or to facilitate computation.”
(Chomsky 2000: 109)
 We can disagree with each other profoundly about what a
‘perfectly designed language’ might look like. But if we do
happen to agree with (c) — then we can say good-bye to
the autonomy of syntax.

91. THE MINIMALIST PROGRAM AND THE
AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX
91
Well before 1995 mainstream syntax was headed in
an anti-autonomist position.
 So we can’t ‘blame’ (or ‘thank’) minimalism for that.

92. THE MINIMALIST PROGRAM AND THE
AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX
92
The most popular formal semantic theories haven’t
meshed comfortably with mainstream generative
syntax.
And the main reason for that is that Chomsky, has
never shown any interest in formal semantics.

93. THE MINIMALIST PROGRAM AND THE
AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX
93
So the tendency has been to ‘go with
what we know’ — to expand syntax
to encompass what is naturally the
domain of semantic theory.

94. DOES THE MINIMALIST PROGRAM MAKE THE
AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX A NON-ISSUE?
94
 “We hypothesize that FLN only includes recursion and
is the only uniquely human component of the faculty
of language.” (Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002: 1569)
 If the quote were correct, then syntax would be
autonomous by definition.

95. DOES THE MINIMALIST PROGRAM MAKE THE
AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX A NON-ISSUE?
95
 In addition to recursion, at least the following are needed in a
minimalist theory:
 a. Economy principles such as Last Resort,
Relativized Minimality (or Minimize Chain Links), and
Anti-Locality. These don’t fall out from recursion per se,
but rather represent conditions that need to be imposed
on it.
 b. The entire set of mechanisms pertaining to
phases, including what nodes count for phasehood and
the various conditions that need to be imposed on their
functioning, like the Phase Impenetrability Condition.

96. DOES THE MINIMALIST PROGRAM MAKE THE
AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX A NON-ISSUE?
96
 c. The categorial inventory (lexical and
functional) needs to be specified, as well as the
formal features they manifest.
 d. The set of parameters (there might be
hundreds), their possible settings, and the
implicational relations among them, need to be
specified.

97. DOES THE MINIMALIST PROGRAM MAKE THE
AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX A NON-ISSUE?
97
e. “PF-syntax.” Some syntactic phenomena that
have been attributed to PF:
i. extraposition and scrambling
ii. object shift
iii. head movements
iv. the movement deriving V2 order
v. linearization (i.e. VO vs. OV)
vi. Wh-movement

98. DOES THE MINIMALIST PROGRAM MAKE THE
AUTONOMY OF SYNTAX A NON-ISSUE?
98
Economy principles, phases,
categories, parameter settings, and
PF syntax clearly differ from
language to language.
So the MP doesn’t make the
question of autonomy irrelevant.

99. THE ANTI-AUTONOMIST TREND THREATENS THE
FOUNDATIONS OF GENERATIVE GRAMMAR
99
 To stress again: the one feature that has made
generative grammar distinctively different from
every other contemporary approach is the claim that
there is something ‘special’ about syntax.
 And furthermore that this ‘specialness’ of syntax is at
the root of the theory of Universal Grammar.

100. THE ANTI-AUTONOMIST TREND THREATENS THE
FOUNDATIONS OF GENERATIVE GRAMMAR
100
 If you give up the Autonomy of Syntax, then the
arguments for innate structural principles disappear.
Opponents of generative grammar claim that the
arguments for UG fall through because Chomsky and
his associates don’t realize how isomorphic syntax is
to semantics (see, for example, Van Valin 1998).

101. THE ANTI-AUTONOMIST TREND THREATENS THE
FOUNDATIONS OF GENERATIVE GRAMMAR
101
The blurring of the distinction between form and
meaning gives a huge opening wedge to opponents
of generative grammar.
 “In a perfectly designed language, each feature
would be semantic or phonetic, not merely a
device to create a position or to facilitate
computation.” (Chomsky 2000: 109)
 “The core similarities across languages have
their origin in two sources: physiological
constraints on the sound system and
conceptual constraints on the semantics.”
(Evans and Levinson 2007: np)

102. THE ANTI-AUTONOMIST TREND THREATENS THE
FOUNDATIONS OF GENERATIVE GRAMMAR
 Peace, harmony, and convergence are good
things, if you don’t have to give up too much to
achieve them.
 Giving up the Autonomy of Syntax is giving up
too much!
102