H. Haider – författare

Derivation or Representation? Hubert Haider & Klaus Netter 1 The Issue Derivation and Representation - these keywords refer both to a conceptual as well as to an empirical issue. Transformational grammar was in its outset (Chomsky 1957, 1975) a derivational theory which characterized a well-formed sentence by its derivation, i.e. a set of syntactic representations defined by a set of rules that map one representation into another. The set of mapping­ rules, the transformations, eventually became more and more abstract and were trivialized into a single one, namely "move a" , a general movement-rule. The constraints on movement were singled out in systems of principles that ap­ ply to the resulting representations, i.e. the configurations containing a moved element and its extraction site, the trace. The introduction of trace-theory (d. Chomsky 1977, ch.3 §17, ch. 4) in principle opened up the possibility of com­ pletely abandoning movement and generating the possible outputs of movement directly, i.e. as structures that contain gaps representing the extraction sites.

o. COMPARATIVE GERMANIC SYNTAX This volume contains 13 papers that were prepared for the Seventh Workshop on Comparative Germanie Syntax at the University of Stuttgart in November 1991. In defining the theme both of the workshop and of this volume, we have taken "comparative" in "comparative Germanic syntax" to mean that at least two languages should be analyzed and "Germanic" to mean that at least one of these languages should be Germanic. There was no require­ ment as such that the research presented should be situated within the framework known as Principles and Parameters Theory (previously known as Government and Binding Theory), though it probably is no accident that this nevertheless turned out to be the case. Within this theory, it is seen as highly desirable to be able to account for several differences on the surface by deriving them from fewer under­ lying differences. The reason is that, in order to explain the ease with which children acquire language, it is assumed that not all knowledge of any given language is the result of learning, but that instead children already possess part of this knowledge at birth (the innate part of linguistic knowledge will obviously be the same for all human beings, and thus this theory also provides an explanation of language universals). The fewer "real" (i.e.

o. COMPARATIVE GERMANIC SYNTAX This volume contains 13 papers that were prepared for the Seventh Workshop on Comparative Germanie Syntax at the University of Stuttgart in November 1991. In defining the theme both of the workshop and of this volume, we have taken "comparative" in "comparative Germanic syntax" to mean that at least two languages should be analyzed and "Germanic" to mean that at least one of these languages should be Germanic. There was no require­ ment as such that the research presented should be situated within the framework known as Principles and Parameters Theory (previously known as Government and Binding Theory), though it probably is no accident that this nevertheless turned out to be the case. Within this theory, it is seen as highly desirable to be able to account for several differences on the surface by deriving them from fewer under­ lying differences. The reason is that, in order to explain the ease with which children acquire language, it is assumed that not all knowledge of any given language is the result of learning, but that instead children already possess part of this knowledge at birth (the innate part of linguistic knowledge will obviously be the same for all human beings, and thus this theory also provides an explanation of language universals). The fewer "real" (i.e.

Derivation or Representation? Hubert Haider & Klaus Netter 1 The Issue Derivation and Representation - these keywords refer both to a conceptual as well as to an empirical issue. Transformational grammar was in its outset (Chomsky 1957, 1975) a derivational theory which characterized a well-formed sentence by its derivation, i.e. a set of syntactic representations defined by a set of rules that map one representation into another. The set of mapping­ rules, the transformations, eventually became more and more abstract and were trivialized into a single one, namely "move a" , a general movement-rule. The constraints on movement were singled out in systems of principles that ap­ ply to the resulting representations, i.e. the configurations containing a moved element and its extraction site, the trace. The introduction of trace-theory (d. Chomsky 1977, ch.3 §17, ch. 4) in principle opened up the possibility of com­ pletely abandoning movement and generating the possible outputs of movement directly, i.e. as structures that contain gaps representing the extraction sites.

Derivation or Representation? Hubert Haider & Klaus Netter 1 The Issue Derivation and Representation - these keywords refer both to a conceptual as well as to an empirical issue. Transformational grammar was in its outset (Chomsky 1957, 1975) a derivational theory which characterized a well-formed sentence by its derivation, i.e. a set of syntactic representations defined by a set of rules that map one representation into another. The set of mapping­ rules, the transformations, eventually became more and more abstract and were trivialized into a single one, namely "move a" , a general movement-rule. The constraints on movement were singled out in systems of principles that ap­ ply to the resulting representations, i.e. the configurations containing a moved element and its extraction site, the trace. The introduction of trace-theory (d. Chomsky 1977, ch.3 §17, ch. 4) in principle opened up the possibility of com­ pletely abandoning movement and generating the possible outputs of movement directly, i.e. as structures that contain gaps representing the extraction sites.