Overt Predicators

He made sure we viewed with skepticism claims about (Russian) syntax made solely on the basis of current theoretical models. He subjected assumed analyses to doubt in several well-known cases where his counter-proposals were later vindicated by general changes in theory. Two well-known examples involving passivization come to mind, one general and one specific. First, Babby challenged the generally accepted notion since the 1960s that Passive was a syntactic transformation. Babby and Brecht (1975) was an early proposal of viewing passive as a (morpho-)lexical operation affecting the argument structure of the verb, rather than a syntactic transformation, and the properties of passive were a side effect of this process. This kind of syntactic "lexicalism", initiated with Chomsky's 1970 "Remarks on Nominalization", has become a hallmark of Leonard Babby's work, which has exposed the complex structure of Russian morpho-lexical operations, and is assumed, in one form or another, in the Minimalist Program of Chomsky (1995), in that the strong claim is now commonly accepted that lexical items enter the derivation fully inflected.1 This entails the existence of a complex set of morpho-lexical operations in the lexicon of exactly the kind Babby has analyzed so fully and so creatively throughout his career. Unfortunately, the technical demands of work in the morpho-lexicon leave little room for making these connections; conversely, although such operations are assumed to exist by practitioners of Minimalism, their nature is not investigated, and their consequences ignored. Future research must discover their relation. Babby's second challenge to accepted practice was to point out to the linguistic world that Burzio's Generalization, namely the claimed correlation between the lack of an external theta-role and absence of Accusative case, clearly did not hold for certain Slavic languages (Ukrainian in particular). This is shown in (2):