Syntactic or Non-Syntactic Reconstruction?

What Changes in ‘Syntactic Change’? Some Implications for Syntactic Reconstruction

1. Much of the debate surrounding the issue of syntactic reconstruction seems to me to be confounded by a certain degree of terminological (and perhaps conceptual) imprecision. In today’s talk I would like to present some aspects of the problem, walking through how they look to someone who makes the set of assumptions that I make regarding how historical linguistics works, what syntax is, what ...

The correspondence problem in syntactic reconstruction

While considerable swathes of the phonology and morphology of protolanguages have been reconstructed using the comparative method, syntax has lagged behind. Jeffers (1976) and Lightfoot (2002a), among others, have questioned whether syntax can be reconstructed at all, claiming that a fundamental problem exists in applying the techniques of phonological reconstruction to syntax. Others, such as ...

Syntactic Congruences and Syntactic Algebras

Non-Syntactic Word Prediction for AAC

Most icon-based augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices require users to formulate messages in syntactic order in order to produce syntactic utterances. Reliance on syntactic ordering, however, may not be appropriate for individuals with limited or emerging literacy skills. Some of these users may benefit from unordered message formulation accompanied by automatic message expan...

Finiteness in Non-Transformational Syntactic Frameworks

I will discuss some aspects of the treatment of finiteness in its various facets given in (1) in the nontransformational theories of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG).1 Due to the way that syntactic information is represented in these approaches, it can be stated at the outset that finiteness is considered to really be a property of a clause. From ...