Syntactic reconstruction and demythologizing `Myths and the prehistory of grammars'  

Oleh:

Harris, Alice C. ; Campbell, Lyle

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Linguistics (Full Text & ada di PROQUEST & JSTOR) vol. 38 no. 2 (Nov. 2002), page 599-618.
Fulltext: syntatic.pdf (233.58KB)

Isi artikel

David Lightfoot's polemical paper, `Myths and the prehistory of grammars' (Lightfoot 2002), addresses two topics. The ®rst is reconstruction, particularly reconstruction of syntax; the intent appears to be to deny that syntax can be reconstructed. The second topic appears to be approaches which attempt to explain syntactic change, though Lightfoot deals with this more obliquely. Lightfoot promotes grammatical theory (coupled with child language acquisition) as the only signi®cant explanation of grammatical change and denies the legitimacy of any alternative view. It is disappointing that the paper mostly only restates familiar Lightfoot claims (especially those in Lightfoot 1979, 1991) without addressing the criticisms of his approach raised in the literature (see in particular Harris & Campbell 1995). Our purpose in this paper is to clarify both topics, which, we argue, have been mistreated in Lightfoot's discussion.

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