tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post2286622321262416948..comments2024-03-17T00:15:20.340-07:00Comments on Faculty of Language: Generative grammar's Chomsky ProblemNorberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comBlogger24125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-64699057025555748942018-09-25T09:09:48.556-07:002018-09-25T09:09:48.556-07:00@Martin: In fact, I don't even understand what...@Martin: <i>In fact, I don't even understand what is the difference between "good theoretical work" and "solid descriptive work"</i><br /><br />You're right that one does not preclude the other, but it's also very clear that the goals --- and by extension the relevant data --- can be vastly different.<br /><br />As a computational linguist, I fall heavily on the theory side of the spectrum. There are many issues that the average linguist cares a lot about that I consider fairly unimportant. Whether there's a separate Asp head in language X and where exactly it goes in the structure is immaterial for the big picture issues that I care most about: computational complexity, expressivity, parsing, learnability, and implications for cognition. And I have a hunch that many linguists will find my work perhaps theoretical, but definitely not descriptive. So it often feels like there is little common ground.<br /><br />But just like Peter and you I don't actually see much of a tension because there is still sufficient overlap. A data point or phenomenon might seem irrelevant now but become crucial at a later point. When I started working on the subregular complexity of phonology, even minor details of stress assignment in Cairene Arabic, n-retroflexion in Sanskrit, or Korean vowel harmony suddenly became very important. And if you think that linguistic hiearchies exhibit certain abstract properties that tie into human cognition in general (as I have been for a while), then functional hierarchies become very interesting and the Asp head in language X might not be so irrelevant after all.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07629445838597321588noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-78043730927279660892018-09-24T12:04:58.760-07:002018-09-24T12:04:58.760-07:00Good, I'm glad that we agree about the relatio...Good, I'm glad that we agree about the relationship of description and theory and that I understand your position on the status of the GB canon. You haven't explicitly responded to my characterization of what we know about A-bar dependencies. Since you mention English bias here, I would like to point out that I personally find it impressive that so many facts about A-bar dependencies which were originally observed in English have been replicated in many and diverse languages. In fact, the evidence that A-bar dependencies are successive-cyclic was originally rather subtle, but then languages like Irish and Chamorro turned out to provide stunning morphological support for it.Peter Svenoniushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09436844670309091617noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-22001243203630411042018-09-24T11:54:26.367-07:002018-09-24T11:54:26.367-07:00In a very direct sense, the theory of extended pro...In a very direct sense, the theory of extended projections replaces much of X-bar theory (and the rest is reduced to "bare phrase structure," or Merge plus labelling). X-bar theory was originally proposed by Chomsky in 1970 to capture parallels between clauses and nominalizations. Jackendoff 1977 took that much further, with three levels of functionally distinct specifiers. There were parallels between what was at the second bar level across categories and so on. What replaces that now are parallels between the T-domain in the clause and the D-domain in the noun phrase, as in Abney 1987; Grimshaw 1991 incorporated Emonds' observations about the shared properties of P and C, with P>D>N being analogous to C>T>V. Most of the things that were specifiers of a lexical projection in Jackendoff 1977 have been reinterpreted as functional heads in a corresponding extended projection, and instead of higher and higher bar levels, as in Jackendoff, you have higher and higher functional levels, Grimshaw's F-levels. <br /><br />In the 2005 version of her paper, Grimshaw applies the extended projection theory to Cinquean cartography. Subsequent work (some of which I mentioned earlier) has proposed theories of the functional hierarchy or hierarchies, rather than just listing; I have made some stabs at that myself. Most of those theories distinguish at least a C-domain, a T-domain, and a V-domain, with distinct properties, with analogous domains in the noun phrase. All of these theories have a lot in common, for example in their treatment of the difference between an adjunct and a functional head. The theories make clear predictions about a cluster of properties that are expected to converge on being a head versus being an adjunct, and they have a good track record. Non-GG work has some analogous categories, descriptively, but I don't know of any work which is not derived from GG which makes equally precise or good predictions. I also don't know of any work challenging the family of models of extended projections, as opposed to challenging assumptions specific to one version or another, of which we have plenty---a healthy situation. <br />Peter Svenoniushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09436844670309091617noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-19283750063079891432018-09-24T10:44:03.421-07:002018-09-24T10:44:03.421-07:00Yes, Cinque (1999) does constitute real progress, ...Yes, Cinque (1999) does constitute real progress, because it makes a very specific proposal about the functional sequence, along the lines of (but more detailed than) Bybee (1985). But the vast majority of the literature on functional heads just adds more language-specific functional heads, without any constraints whatsoever, and often just in order to provide "landing sites". I don't see this as replacing X-bar theory, but as recognizing that the world is much richer, but without a good idea of how to constrain it (except for Bybee-Cinque, as noted earlier). But I would go further: The idea of functional heads has created a lot of confusion, because it is no longer clear what the trees stand for: constituency? semantic scope? binding relations? prominence of argument roles? If there were any clear convergence among these kinds of notions, then functional heads would be justified, but I don't see this.Martin Haspelmathhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06543404533971718475noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-26334820789449550572018-09-24T10:33:45.066-07:002018-09-24T10:33:45.066-07:00I agree with this characterization, Peter – it'...I agree with this characterization, Peter – it's true that I don't think that the "GB canon of knowledge" is descriptively accurate. It's full of bias from English, and full of hopes that have not been fulfilled, or have yet to be fulfilled. And I also agree that the tension between "philological(??) details" and "cognitive implications" is not interesting. In fact, I don't even understand what is the difference between "good theoretical work" and "solid descriptive work" – why should there be two different adjectives here? How can descriptive work be atheoretical, and how can theoretical work be undescriptive?Martin Haspelmathhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06543404533971718475noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-44713120507444148352018-09-24T06:14:49.508-07:002018-09-24T06:14:49.508-07:00Returning to Norbert's original post, I really...Returning to Norbert's original post, I really like the idea, laid out at length in Norbert’s “Whig history” series of posts in March-April 2015, that MP sets out to explain the GB era model and its results, rather than to replace them or repudiate them.<br /><br />It follows, as Norbert says, that it will be very hard to be excited about MP if you don't think that the GB canon of knowledge is descriptively accurate. You might expect there to be a cline of enthusiasm -- the more you think that GG accurately discovered between, say 1977 and 1995, the more enthusiasm you might feel for MP. You might say Martin and Norbert occupy opposite ends of the spectrum.<br /><br />I think there are also a few people in the other two corners -- grumpy recalcitrant GBists who had faith in the old system but think the MP is a big mistake, and true believers who don’t command the GB-era facts but like the MP because of its conceptual appeal. But it might be right that most people fall somewhere on the cline predicted by Norbert’s “Whiggish” interpretation of the relation between GB and MP. <br /><br />Something that I find less helpful is the idea of a “tension” between “those mainly interested in the philological details of languages and those interested in the mental/cognitive/neuro implications of linguistic competence.” I’m not saying that the field of linguistics isn’t full of tensions, but I don’t feel that that accurately locates the interesting ones. I don’t feel that there’s any tension whatsoever between good theoretical work and the kind of solid descriptive work on individual languages that requires years of immersion and painstaking fieldwork. Individual theoreticians can be hostile to philology and vice-versa, but the hostility or tension isn’t intrinsic to the nature of the respective enterprises. Take Tomasello, for example -- he is hostile to GG, but not because he’s interested in philological details; quite the opposite. <br />Peter Svenoniushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09436844670309091617noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-47450648497437817802018-09-23T23:49:58.073-07:002018-09-23T23:49:58.073-07:00When it comes to X-bar theory, it is true that the...When it comes to X-bar theory, it is true that the theory of projection from a lexical head turned out not to explain as much as the hopes expressed in Jackendoff's 1977 book. But I contest the characterization "nothing has replaced those bold ideas" and "[we have] no clear progress in understanding what drives these kinds of phenomena." X-bar theory was supplemented in the 80s and 90s by theories of functional heads and extended projections, using tools like the Mirror Principle originally explored by Baker and the incipient theory of head movement and developed in a huge number of works exploring the properties of individual functional heads like D and Num and C and T and Asp but also in works developing the broader theory of the extended projections of the clause and noun phrase by people like Grimshaw, Cinque, Travis, Ritter, Wiltschko, and many others. As for the unification of binding and movement, I would say the central facts still underlie the generative focus on structure as a central feature of utterances, even if the parallels between specific cases of movement and specific cases of binding are not as simple as Chomsky thought in 1981, so I reject the characterization "those hopes have long been gone." Yes, we have moved beyond the characterizations of 1977 and 1981, but I see progress, not failure. (In case it isn't clear, both this remark and my previous one are replies to Martin Haspelmath's comment of September 21st. The previous one was more of an echo of Norbert, because the successes of GG that he pointed to included the A-bar phenomena I mentioned. But the theory of functional heads and extended projections that I mention here did not figure prominently in Norbert's 2015 list of GG's achievements.)Peter Svenoniushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09436844670309091617noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-16474372185723687702018-09-21T10:32:34.570-07:002018-09-21T10:32:34.570-07:00I don't think anything has emerged to challeng...I don't think anything has emerged to challenge the most basic insights about for example A-bar dependencies. They are strikingly uniform across constructions, so that within a language, conditions on question formation will parallel conditions on relative clause formation, for example. Across languages, they are used for the same kinds of things, like question formation and relative clause formation, and have their tails in thematic positions and their heads in c-commanding positions. They are sensitive to relativized minimality type intervention, i.e. they don't freely cross things that are too similar to themselves. They are sensitive to certain kinds of structural boundaries such as finite clause boundaries, which give various kinds of evidence of successive-cyclicity, and adjunct boundaries, which often induce island effects. There are different specific theories of these facts, for example some involving SLASH and some involving traces, and some involving barriers and some involving phases, but if you abstract away from the details, it seems to me they are all based on a set of facts which are broadly accepted and don't face serious empirical challenge.<br />Peter Svenoniushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09436844670309091617noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-21243733681545540892018-09-21T05:12:21.501-07:002018-09-21T05:12:21.501-07:00@Jason Yes, Label theory is wrong. But so is every...@Jason Yes, Label theory is wrong. But so is every scientific theory. The question for me is "Is it less wrong than the alternatives?" Of course, that question presupposes that there are alternatives, and I know of no other plausible alternative theories of projection that have been worked out so as to make any definite predictions (I know Norbert has an alternative in the works). Perhaps I'm mistaken, though.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07202099199620783128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-91845939191537617712018-09-21T05:04:15.608-07:002018-09-21T05:04:15.608-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07202099199620783128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-61000164222859974452018-09-21T01:51:22.918-07:002018-09-21T01:51:22.918-07:00"By the mid 90s, GG had discovered somewhere ..."By the mid 90s, GG had discovered somewhere in the vicinity of 25-35 non-trivial universals (i.e. design features of FL) that were “roughly” correct. These “laws of grammar” constitute, IMO, a great intellectual achievement."<br /><br />I wish this were true, though it's easy to see how the often triumphalist rhetoric of MGG authors may lead some people to think that there are major discoveries here. But in fact, all we have is an impressive widening of the phenomena – an achievement in charting the territory, no doubt (akin to James Cook's and Joseph Banks's achievements in the 18th century), but no clear progress in understanding what drives these kinds of phenomena. In the 1970s, Jackendoff thought that X-bar theory was a major breakthrough in depth of understanding, and in the 1980s, many thought that the unification of binding and constraints on movement were a breakthrough. But those hopes have long been gone, and nothing has replaced those bold ideas, as far as I can see. We have a lot of phenomena in a lot of languages, often with fancy names that outsiders may take as demonstrating our smartness ("incorporation", "weak cross-over", "heteroclisis", "parasitic gap", "deponency", "split ergativity"), but in fact, we don't have a general theory that explains much of this. In some cases, (thanks to Greenberg) we have a good idea about the (lack of) cross-linguistic generality of these phenomena, but in most cases, we don't.Martin Haspelmathhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06543404533971718475noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-6973130355252352672018-09-21T00:09:20.457-07:002018-09-21T00:09:20.457-07:00"pushing a theory of labeling where labeling ..."pushing a theory of labeling where labeling subserves a semantic need seems fundamentally wrong-headed to me." And to me. Labeling is needed to allow selection to work. L(exical)-selection, the hardest case, not reducible to Case or semantic selection, has for the most part simply fallen off the agenda and been forgotten, it seems to me (please correct me if I'm wrong). But no C-I requirement can plausibly tell us that "angry at", "proud of", "interested in", etc pair they way they do. We need l-selection, which means we need labels that are at least as fine-tuned as distinguishing "at" from "of", "in" etc requires. These relations are fundamentally *syntactic*, and so any theory of syntax that claims that these relations can be captured by or at the C-I interface has an uphill battle for the hearts and minds. I think the struggle of our published Minimalist systems to be able to even code such relations is one reason for some of the skepticism about the system's potential for wider success as well.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10326272927224445117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-39308726882601890792018-09-20T21:44:55.488-07:002018-09-20T21:44:55.488-07:00Those studies, though, only lead to the conclusion...Those studies, though, only lead to the conclusion that the CI system isn't sensitive to labels if you assume a certain theory of the CI system. Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07202099199620783128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-51610610287260242642018-09-20T16:25:35.166-07:002018-09-20T16:25:35.166-07:00We might have different ideas of what NC proposes....We might have different ideas of what NC proposes. Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06409248369107264434noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-59899864155416565892018-09-20T16:24:19.613-07:002018-09-20T16:24:19.613-07:00Yes, I think that is basically right, and is nigh-...Yes, I think that is basically right, and is nigh-on what Cecchetto and Donati suggest. You might think of heads as being determined by C-selection (more or less), but that still isn't Merge doing the work. Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06409248369107264434noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-71796628108422161442018-09-20T16:05:58.382-07:002018-09-20T16:05:58.382-07:00@John: Even if this is so, the "head algorith...@John: Even if this is so, the "head algorithm" that you envision would merely recapitulate a syntax-internal computation that's already necessary in order to do c-selection (which also needs to know whether "kill Bill" is headed by "kill" or by "Bill"), so I don't see how this move would salvage Chomsky's proposal.Omerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06157677977442589563noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-69143933225696028662018-09-20T16:02:03.096-07:002018-09-20T16:02:03.096-07:00I mean that the C-I interface cares that [a, b] i...I mean that the C-I interface cares that [a, b] is headed by one or the other item. 'Kill Bill' specifies an event, not an individual. It doesn't matter what the labels themselves are, and I assume that no-one is suggesting that semantics cares for NP and VP as such. I'd also suggest that standard type theory in semantics is wholly descriptive and has deep conceptual limitations. I do think that talk of labels is perhaps misbegotten. NC could have appealed to a 'head algorithm' instead.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06409248369107264434noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-80807605160486819182018-09-20T15:44:53.554-07:002018-09-20T15:44:53.554-07:00@John: I don't understand what the assumption ...@John: I don't understand what the assumption that "the C-I interface requires the results of Merge to have an identity" is supposed to rest on. There is copious evidence (e.g. c-selection) that <i>syntax</i> cares about the identity of the results of Merge, in a way that cannot reduce to anything the C-I interface should reasonably care about. (Of course, you can situate any kind of filtration "at the C-I interface," but that would just be an abuse of the technical vocabulary unless it is shown that this filter can be reasonably attributed to the demands of Conceptual-Intentional interpretation, and c-selection most definitely doesn't fit the bill.)<br /><br />Note, moreover, that even if we counterfactually grant the quoted assumption above – "the C-I interface requires the results of Merge to have an identity" – the idea that this identity would be stated in terms of syntactic categories seems incongruous to me. To name but one example, in most contemporary semantic theories, nouns and verbs are both predicates of type <e,t>, i.e., semantics seems to emphatically not care about the categorial distinction between the two. (Granted, D0 and Num0 do different things with this denotation than T0, Asp0, and v0 do; but that brings us back to c-selection, about which, see above.) So the C-I interface seems like the last place in the grammar that should care about the distinction between "NP" and "VP."<br /><br />Omerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06157677977442589563noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-26542836484554535822018-09-20T15:34:30.619-07:002018-09-20T15:34:30.619-07:00I don't read Chomsky's idea as being that ...I don't read Chomsky's idea as being that labels encode or predict semantic properties. It is more that Merge itself doesn't include projection or headedness, and the C-I interface requires the results of Merge to have an identity. Thus, one needs a mechanism to determine from the properties of the merged items, which item projects. This was actually kinda suggested in MP, so is not really that new.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06409248369107264434noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-21560486741791411262018-09-20T12:33:54.566-07:002018-09-20T12:33:54.566-07:00"I suspect that down the road there will be a...<i>"I suspect that down the road there will be a reshuffling of the professional boundaries of the discipline, with some study of language of the Chomsky variety moving in with cog-neuro and some returning to the language departments."</i><br /><br />That's assuming that the language departments would want their linguists back. As far as I know language programs have largely excised grammar from their UG curricula, at least in the US. So what would they do with linguists? Not a lot of potential for additional grant revenue, and if you want a large-enrollment linguistics intro to improve the department metrics, you can just hire an adjunct/lecturer since there's many freshly minted PhDs with no other choice if they want to stay in academia.<br /><br />Similarly, no cog-sci department will jump at the opportunity to hire a generative grammarian when they can have a computational modeling neuro-guy/gal, whose research can draw from multiple funding pots and might even make the news.<br /><br />I don't see that changing anytime soon. So linguists will stay under the same institutional roof, although each department's roof might be heavily slanted in one of the two directions. Not too different from what we have right now.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07629445838597321588noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-70008537491176714762018-09-20T09:03:17.890-07:002018-09-20T09:03:17.890-07:00I was perhaps a bit sloppy: I see no reason to obj...I was perhaps a bit sloppy: I see no reason to object to C-I <i>caring</i> about labels; what I am objecting to is the idea that labels exist (or are added) to <i>satisfy</i> a C-I need. And the reasons for that are well-known and well-trodden: there's the work from the 80s that I already mentioned (by Pesetsky & others) showing that c-selection doesn't reduce to semantics. There's also the much more venerable observations, you know, that verbs aren't (necessarily) "actions" and nouns aren't (necessarily) "things." And it's not just nouns and verbs: Bobaljik & Wurmbrand have a recent paper on questions with declarative syntax (i.e., so-called "declarative" C doesn't have a fully consistent semantic interpretation); Ritter & Wiltschko have a paper (2009) showing that the semantic content of Infl can be tense, or person, or location, depending on the language; and so on. I think, at the end of the day, this is fully general: labels might have (loose) semantic <i>correlates</i>, but they are not themselves semantic in nature. I think the evidence here is quite overwhelming.<br /><br />In light of this, pushing a theory of labeling where labeling subserves a semantic need seems fundamentally wrong-headed to me.Omerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06157677977442589563noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-74179167850839368592018-09-20T08:52:40.429-07:002018-09-20T08:52:40.429-07:00Why do you think it's ridiculous to propose th...Why do you think it's ridiculous to propose that the CI system cares about labels? <br /><br />(I think I know the answer to this, but I'd rather not assume.)Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07202099199620783128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-4590688023860891172018-09-19T16:47:55.368-07:002018-09-19T16:47:55.368-07:00(To be clear: I think that probe-goal was a real, ...(To be clear: I think that probe-goal was a real, substantive step forward, shedding new light on Rizzi's 1990 results; Phase Theory was more or less neutral (for the reasons mentioned above), and then the backslide begins. ymmv, of course.)Omerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06157677977442589563noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-64020903734305743402018-09-19T16:26:00.772-07:002018-09-19T16:26:00.772-07:00I think there's another component lurking here...I think there's another component lurking here, which has, in some sense, been with us since the inception of the Minimalist Program. And it is the following:<br /><br />In parallel to articulating the Minimalist Program (about which, I basically agree with everything you say here, save for maybe the pessimistic coda), Chomsky has also been putting forth a series of specific proposals: probe-goal, Phase Theory, uninterpretable features, Feature Inheritance, the Minimal Labeling Algorithm. I might be wrong about this, but from where I sit, these are <b>not</b> quite MPish proposals. That is, if we consider GB explorations to be "level 1"; and MP explorations (how GB-like principles could sprout from a more stripped down, minimally-stated FL) to be "level 2"; then the proposals just enumerated are something like "level 1.5": they are attempts to restate certain "level 1"(=GB) generalizations in ways that may make the eventual "level 2"(=MP) work (deriving them from a simple FL) easier than it would have been, if it had been working directly with the original "level 1"(=GB) statements of those generalizations.<br /><br />(I think this is what some people have in mind when they attempt to differentiate between the Minimalist <i>Program</i> and a particular Minimalist <i>Theory</i>; if so, then what I'm trying to highlight here is that a lot of the work that Chomsky himself has done in the past 20 years or so is actually developing a particular Minimalist Theory, not developing the Program.)<br /><br />And now here's the issue, as I see it: these specific proposals (probe-goal, Phase Theory, uninterpretable features, Feature Inheritance, the Minimal Labeling Algorithm) have been, in my opinion, increasingly bad. Just not good linguistics. Phase Theory, on its best day, is a restatement of Subjacency with hints of Barriers sprinkled in. I find the recent labeling stuff (in the "Problems of Projection" papers) to be outright embarrassing, being both theoretically retrograde (the Conceptual-Intentional system cares about syntactic labels? really?? didn't we spend the early 80's earning hard-won insights such as c-selection not, in fact, reducing to semantics?), and empirically dead-on-arrival (see, e.g., <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170520210016/https://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2014/07/guest-post-spectp-agreement-fallacy.html" rel="nofollow">here</a>).<br /><br />I could go on, but the point is this: to the extent that people look to Chomsky's own proposals as the standard for what work under the MP umbrella will look like, they've been confronted with a pretty poor collection of exemplars. This sends the (implicit) message that those with MPish concerns can only pursue them by first substituting the "level 1" results we know with these shoddy "level 1.5" replacements. In one sense, this is all fine: science is practiced by humans, humans are imperfect and sometimes do bad work, a bad proposal doesn't invalidate the framework within which it was proposed, etc. etc. But I think you are underestimating the sociological impact that these proposals have had on the perception of MPish work in the (ever so slightly) wider generative syntax community. This is not ending up "empirically where we started"; this is a fairly unfettered backslide.Omerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06157677977442589563noreply@blogger.com