Simpler Syntax

Peter W. Culicover is Chair of the Department of Linguistics and former Director of the Center for Cognitive Science at the Ohio State University. His books include Formal Principles of Language Acquisition (1980, with Kenneth Wexler), Principles and Parameters (1997), Syntactic Nuts (1999), and Dynamical Grammar (2003, with Andrzej Nowak). Ray Jackendoff is Professor of Philosophy and Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He was previously Professor of Linguistics at Brandeis University. His books include Semantics and Cognition (1983), Consciousness and the Computational Mind (1987), A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1982, with Fred Lerdahl), Foundations of Language (2002), and Simpler Syntax (2005, with Peter W. Culicover). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a past president of the Linguistic Society of America and of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology.

This groundbreaking book offers a new and compelling perspective on the structure of human language.

• PART I CUTTING SYNTAX DOWN TO SIZE ; 1. Why Simpler Syntax? ; 2. How did we get here? Principles and early history of mainstream syntax ; 3. Later History of Mainstream Syntax ; 4. Flat Structure ; PART II THE SYNTAX-SEMANTICS INTERFACE ; 5. Basic Clause Structure ; 6. The Grammatical Function Tier ; 7. Bare Argument Ellipsis and its Relatives ; 8. VP Ellipsis and its Relatives ; 9. Discontinuous Dependencies ; PART III BINDING AND CONTROL ; 10. Mme. Tussaud Meets the Binding Theory ; 11. Something Else for the Binding Theory ; 12. The Semantic Basis of Control in English ; PART IV CONNECTIONS BETWEEN CLAUSES ; 13. Semantic Subordination Despite Syntactic Coordination ; 14. The View from the Periphery: The English comparative correlative ; 15. What is Language Like? Moving On