1965 -1986

In the 60s and 70s …

War in Linguistics

Some people doubted Chomsky

George Lakoff

Isn’t MEANING more important?

Can these trees really tell us so much?

Aren’t our minds about MEANING?

Paul Postal

Chomsky is empty

James McCawley

Generative Semantics

John Ross

Generative semantics

Ray Jackendoff

Cognitive Linguistics

No universal grammar

But Chomsky won!!

Syntax (grammar) is MOST IMPORTANT!

Study grammar …

… and understand the brain!

Trees will tell you about the brain!

Chomsky’s grammar was triumphant

Unique universal grammar

The language faculty

How language ability REALLY works

Forget about meaning!!

Meaning isn’t so important

So how can we understand our language ability?

Why is the –ed before the verb?

It’s “she walked”

Not she “–ed walk”

That’s crazy

Well, we are looking for universals

Look

Aux is before the verb

The tense bit is BEFORE the verb

Before the verb

There must be INVISIBLE movement

Or it would be untidy

So how about OTHER movement?

Did she walk?

Maybe the tense bit is moving?

To an Operator position

Makes a question sentence

So we’re getting NEW categories

Predicate Phrase

Predicate Phrase: more complex VP

Carries tense, aspect, mood etc

And an Operator node

Things can move there

Change the kind of sentence

Did that girl open the door?

Magic!

Movement

So how about OTHER movement?

Move one bit

Can give us uniformity

Any other ways to get uniformity?

Because it’s UNIVERSAL grammar

Things should be the same

X-bar theory

XP, X’, X

N, N’, NP

V, V’, VP

P, P’, PP

Perfect

Everything is the same!

No wait!

What about S?

And what about aux?

What are we going to do about aux?

Aux, Aux’, AuxP?

Well aux carries tense, aspect, mood etc

Aux is the Inflectional information

Maybe it’s an INFLECTIONAL phrase?

How about like this?

All the same!

Perfect!