Much of language is not language
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Syntactic structures have traditionally been overwhelmingly about verbs and their arguments and modifiers, with just a little bit of 'stuff' (eg. S/S') added -- reflecting the view that "the core of syntax" is about the behavior of verbs and their arguments and modifiers. As syntactic inquiry become more sophisticated and fine-grained, that little bit of 'stuff' grew into a large number of functional projections capturing the differing syntax of definite vs indefinite nouns in a number of languages, tensed versus untensed verbs, completion adverbs versus frequentative adverbs, the interaction of floating quantifiers and passive auxiliaries, etc. In this talk, I argue that the evolution of that little bit of 'stuff' completely changes our view of the architecture of language, parts of the philosophy of mind, the relationship of language to non-language faculties, etc. Of particular relevance to this conference, much of what we thought to be language turns out to be language-independent - what we might call 'language-free syntax'. |
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