Deconstructing Syntactic Theory: A Critical Review

Deconstructing Syntactic Theory is a critical examination of the assumptions and methodologies of contemporary derivational syntactic theory. The study ranges from the earliest work inspired by Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax to the present-day Minimalist Program.

The book begins with an examination of the relationship between syntactic structure, linear order, and meaning, and the role of uniformity, in motivating derivational analysis that assume movement and invisible structure. A central property of such analyses is that they are cryptoconstructional: construction-specific stipulations are assumed in order to derive the form and meaning of expressions. The second part looks at a range of technical and empirical problems of derivational syntax, which require theoretical stipulations and devices to properly constrain cryptoconstructional analyses. The focus is particularly on problems relating to movement and problems of invisibility.

In Part III, the authors turn to the question of the independent justification of syntactic structure, arguing that much hierarchical structure is not only unnecessary, but also does not yield optimal analyses for a number of grammatical phenomena. Part IV focuses on the use of syntax to account for phenomena that are arguably not syntactic; it concludes that using syntax to model semantic phenomena is at best not necessary, and at worse empirically inadequate. Similarly, using syntax to model morphological relations works only for a narrow subset of cases and cannot be sustained more generally without causing significant internal problems. The book concludes with a review of minimalism, laying out aspects of the logic of the Minimalist Program, its assumptions, and their motivations and consequences. The authors argue that minimalism is best achieved by a leaner theory of linguistic representations, along the lines of the constructional architecture of Simpler Syntax, as proposed by Culicover and Jackendoff (2005).

Peter W. Culicover, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, The Ohio State University, Giuseppe Varaschin, Researcher, Department of German Studies and Linguistics, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Peter W. Culicover is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the Ohio State University, where he was founding Director of the Center for Cognitive Science (1989-2003) and Chair of the Department of Linguistics (1998-2006). His research is concerned primarily with understanding and explaining the syntactic structure of human languages, and he has explored such topics as language learnability, computational modeling of language acquisition and language change, the grammar of focus, grammatical constructions, the grammar of contemporary English, and the architecture of grammar. His many publications with OUP include Grammar and Complexity (2013), Explaining Syntax (2013), and Language Change, Variation, and Universals (2021).

Giuseppe Varaschin is a researcher and lecturer in the Department of German Studies and Linguistics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he is currently part of the research project ＂Building register into the architecture of language - an HPSG account＂. He specializes in syntactic theory and the syntax-semantics interface. His current work explores topics such as syntactic variation, social meaning, sociolinguistic perception, anaphora, agreement, and the architecture of grammar, with a focus on English, German, and Romance languages. He is also interested in developing computer-processable grammar fragments as a way of checking the formal consistency and large-scale empirical adequacy of theoretical proposals.