Syntactic Nuts: Hard Cases, Syntactic Theory, and Language Acquisition (Foundations of Grammar) - Hardcover

Culicover, Peter W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198700245 ISBN 13: 9780198700241

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1999

Synopsis

This book investigates the architecture of the language faculty by considering what the properties of language reveal about the mental abilities and processes involved in language acquisition. The language faculty, the author argues, must be able not only to accommodate what is general,
exceptionless, and universal in language, but must also be capable of dealing with what is irregular, exceptional, and idiosyncratic. In Syntactic Nuts Peter Culicover shows that this is true not only of the lexicon, but for syntax.

Marginal and exceptional cases, where there is no straightforward form-meaning correspondence, are dealt with by the language faculty easily and precisely as the general cases. In considering how and why this should be the author argues against the prevailing trend in generative grammar, which
takes the learner as either incorporating maximally global generalisations as part of its innate capacity for language, or projecting global generalisations from a very limited input on the basis of innate mechanisms. He suggests that the learning mechanism does not generalize significantly beyond
the evidence presented to it, and further that it seeks to form generalizations based on all and only the evidence presented to it.

Syntactic Nuts makes a fundamental contribution to generative grammar and syntactic theory. It situates syntactic theory within cognitive science in a novel way. It contributes to an alternative, and yet in many ways traditional, perspective on the manner in which knowledge is represented and
processed in the mind.

About this title

About the Author

Peter W. Culicover is currently the Chair of the Department of Linguistics and Director of the Center for Cognitive Science at the Ohio State University.

Review

`I commend Culicover's new book, not just because of the inherent interest of the data which it analyzes, but also because it points up significant areas of convergence - and differentiation - between linguistic approaches which, until recently, were radically opposed on just about
everything.'
John R. Taylor, Cognitive Linguistics 10-3 (1999).

`Culicover takes us on an invigorating tour through a vast range of 'idiosyncratic' data.'
John R. Taylor, Cognitive Linguistics 10-3 (1999).

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0198700245
• ISBN 13: 9780198700241
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256