Simon: (in hushed voice, looking at Yo-Shang’s homework) What did you do that in? Pages?
Yo-Shang: Oh, just OpenOffice.
Later that day over IM
Simon: HIS LAMBDAS WERENT OPEN OFFICE LAMBDAS
Simon: and HOW DID HE GET THOSE BRACKETS
Simon: CMON
emma :: Apr.10.2007 :: misc, nerdiness :: 3 Comments »
Emma: but! hey! we will forge the way to more communication between cogsci and ling
Celeste: yeah
Celeste: like that movie
Celeste: where the cat is friends with the dog
Celeste: and they go on adventures together
Emma: milo and otis
Celeste: yes.
Emma: and when we get older our puppies and kitties will hang out and go on adventures
Celeste: while the credits roll
emma :: Apr.10.2007 :: misc :: 4 Comments »
[Note: this was cut from a much rantier post on PRO, the Carnie text and the “mainstream” view of syntax. Simon read it and said I sounded hysterical…so I decided to cut it down to this, which is much less ranty, but also much less explanatory if you haven’t seen any alternatives to the mainstream view. So, for now, here’s this, and when I’ve come off my coffee high hysteria, I’ll try to explain what this was all about.]
This past week in Polly’s syntax class we’ve been covering the topic of control, cases such as:
(1) Emma is reluctant to accept the theta criterion.
We were introduced to two ways of approaching these types of constructions. With our “Tuesday mainstream†hats on (on Tuesdays we cover the mainstream treatments of syntax, on Thursdays we cover the Categorial Grammar treatments) we looked at how transformational grammar (and descendants thereof) introduced the null, silent PRO and coindexed PRO with the subject of the matrix clause to give the following analysis for (1) at D-structure:
(2) Emmai is reluctant to PROi accept the theta criterion.
Carnie’s explanation of PRO:
Why do we need PRO? If we didn’t have PRO, then we would have violations of the theta criterion. Notice that what we are doing here is proposing a null element to account for an apparent hole in our theory (a violation of either the theta criterion or the Case filter). There is good reason to be suspicious of this: It seems like a technical solution to a technical problem that is raised only by our particular formulation of the constraints. Nonetheless, it does have a good deal of descriptive power. It can account for most of the data having to do with embedded infinitival clauses. Until a better theory comes along, the PRO hypothesis wins because it can explain so much data.
emma :: Apr.10.2007 :: misc, syntax, linguistics :: No Comments »