Nanosyntax

A new tiny “note on Kim’s Korean question particles seen as pronouns“. In a recent lingbuzz paper, Kim makes the interesting observation that the so-called question particles of Korean are in fact pronouns (with one exception) and those pronouns express the addressee of the question. To capture that, Kim analyzes them as pronouns filling the addressee slot of questions under a performative analysis. Here I simply point out that his analysis doesn’t entirely work, but does work if it is rephrased in terms of nanosyntax and phrasal spellout with the superset principle.

I have posted a new paper on lingbuzz about how to do parameters. It has been 30 years that the Principles & Parameters framework has revolutionized linguistic theory, but there is a real sense in which we still don’t have a theory of parameters, of what format they have, what they are (”principles”, the invariant parts, have been faring much better). We still just stipulate them by brute force: EPP features, edge-features, strong features, etc. This paper shows that if we accept nanosyntax, we are now finally in position to do parameters in a clean and elegant way: parameters are just “sizes” of lexical items. If two similarl words behave differently in two different languages, it is simply because the two languages store a slightly different size of syntactic structure in the lexical entry of that word. I don’t know if it is the right theory, but I do now that this shows that you can have a real theory of parameters, which was non-existant up to now.

The great grad students in Barcelona are organising a debate between Michal Starke and Cedric Boeckxx called “New Paths in Linguistic Theory”, to understand better the difference between Nanosyntax and the so-called “radical minimalism”. It sounds like fun, and some of the are clearly anticipating action

Marc Hauser is close to the heart of many generative linguists, for two reasons: he is a co-author on the Chomsky, Hauser and Fitch paper which has generated a little tempest in a teapot, bringing the hope of an exciting foundational debate (is recursion the key ingredient setting aside language from other cognitive abilities? no) and providing some fresh and juicy linguistic wars reminiscent of the old days of the field. Aside from this role, Hauser is also the champion of an idea that makes the linguist feel warm and fuzzy: linguistic theories appealing to innateness and parameters provide a good framework to understand human morality and its evolution.
That brings the earthquake dangerously close to home: Marc Hauser is under U.S. federal investigation for data fabrication and intellectual fraud. The affair is still surrounded by secrecy; it is thus difficult to form an educated opinion. What is coming out so far is that research assistants in his lab are speaking up about data-fabrication and a Harvard inquiry has confirmed “eight instances of scientific misconduct”. There have been several high profile cases of data-fabrication recently, all in fields distant from ours, taking place in a very different style of publishing pressure and data-gathering. This time however, if all of this turns out to be true, it is the walls of our own house that are resonating with a sinister reminder about how tempting it can be to fit data into our preferred theory…

Bjorn Lundqvist’s PhD thesis about Nominalizations and Participles in Swedish was added to the list of nanowritings, as well as Ramchand’s “Lexical Items in Complex Predications: Selection as Underassociation“.

Nice to see a phonology paper be the #1 download on lingbuzz as we’re slowly getting towards 1000th uploaded articles!

The list of nanopapers was upgraded with a number of articles by Antonio Fabregas which just appeared on lingbuzz. There are still many missing and the list will grow over the next few weeks.