Abstract
We remarked in chapter I that any interesting proposal concerning human linguistic performance must make reference to the structure of language, i.e. the representational form and informational content which determines the interpretation of utterances. As Chomsky (1980) has pointed out, without reference to such structure, theories of performance will be inherently superficial and uninteresting. Furthermore, to the extent that any proposed model of processing claims to be (at least partially) innate, it will crucially depend upon the knowledge of language determined by UG.
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Notes
That is, some verbs, such as send s-select for a destination complement, as in Alan sent the book to the publisher but which may be absent as in Alan sent the letter (although arguably there is some understood, if possibly underdetermined, DESTINATION).
There are proposals which advocate the base generation of the subject within the VP (possibly the [Spec,VP] position), followed by movement to [Spec,IP] (see (Manzini 1992, page 86–88) and references cited therein). This has the advantage that no extra mechanism is required for dealing with the assignment of the verb’s external role to a position outside the VP. We will take up discussion of this point in §111.3.4.
This is in fact the name of the Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) principle which is roughly equivalent to the Theta Criterion (Bresnan & Kaplan 1982).
Whether or not extraposition involves adjunction to VP, or IP is a matter of some debate in the literature. See (Rochemont & Culicover 1990) for arguments on this point.
So that we may generalise this formulation of the Case Filter, we assume that NPs in situ form a Chain of unit length (at least at S-Structure), which must similarly be assigned Case exactly once.
These definitions have been adapted from the general proposals of Lasnik & Saito (1992) and those upon which that work is based.
Note, this requires that the government domain be determined by the first (i.e. lowest) X 2 node. In the present system however, we assume m-command to be determined by the ‘collective’ set of X 2 nodes (i.e. the highest node of the phrase).
We assume that himself is the controller of PRO, since remind is an object control verb. That is, if we replace the reflexive with, say, Mary, then it is clearly the object which controls the embedded subject.
For further discussion, the reader is also referred to (Chomsky 1986b) and (Rizzi 1986).
This idea is not particularly new. See (Kolb & Thiersch 1990), (Muysken 1983), and (Cann 1988) for similar approaches.
A full exposition of these principles is not required for this discussion. Indeed a number of existing proposals could be adopted. In particular, the present system draws on the work of (Chomsky 1986a), (Chomsky 1986b), and (Lasnik & Saito 1992).
It is possible that the derivational model may have more expressive power than the mono-stratal, Chain-based one. This issue is currently a matter of debate in the field, and is beyond the scope of our discussion. Chomsky has continued to argue in favour of a truly derivational theory (Chomsky 1986a) (Chomsky 1988) while others have argued against (Rizzi 1986) (Koster 1987). The arguments are not only very subtle, but also highly theory-internal, and hence not compelling enough to deter the model proposed here.
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© 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Crocker, M.W. (1996). Principles, Parameters and Representations. In: Computational Psycholinguistics. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1600-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1600-5_3
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