Here together for the first time are all of Frederick J. Newmeyer's writings on the origins and development of generative grammar. Spanning a period of fifteen years the essays address the nature of the "Chomskian Revolution", the deep structure debates of the 1970s, and the attempts to apply generative theory to second language acquisition. Written by one of America's most prominent linguists, these articles provide a challenging reappraisal of the "Chomskian Revolution"--the implications of which are still being debated some three decades on.
This book introduces generative grammar as an area of study and asks what it tells us about the human mind. Wolfram Hinzen lays the foundation for the unification of modern generative linguistics with the philosophies of mind and language. He introduces Chomsky's program of a "minimalist" syntax as a novel explanatory vision of the human mind. He explains how the Minimalist Program originated in work in cognitive science, biology, linguistics, and philosophy, and examines its implications for work in these fields.
The goal of this book is twofold. On the one hand we want to offer a discussion of some of the more important properties of the nominal projection, on the other hand we want to provide the reader with tools for syntactic analysis which apply to the structure of DP but which are also relevant for other domains of syntax.
Generative analyses of comparatives traditionally include two construction specific ellipsis operations, Comparative Deletion and Comparative Ellipsis. Drawing from a wide array of new data, the present monograph develops a novel, directly semantically interpretable analysis of comparatives which does not require reference to designated deletion processes.
