Deriving Discontinuity

This paper is partly born of an increasing sense of uncertainty about how to do syntax. Time was, we linguists had at our disposal a generally accepted arsenal of analytic devices to deal with a familiar range of constructions and phenomena. However, as the phenomena under study began to proliferate, so did the analyses. The increasingly baroque GB architecture began to collapse under the weight of Japanese, but it was the vagaries of Slavic that surely “brought the house down”. Now, one might think that Minimalism—with its appeal to elegance and its purported aim of narrowing the search space for credible hypotheses to those that stray as little as possible from “virtual conceptual necessity”—would at the very least provide us with a general blueprint for how to construct the right sort of analysis for any given problem. Unfortunately, it does not seem to me that we are there yet. The leading ideas are broad, expansive, and on occasion even profound, but actually applying them to real linguistic data can be a very frustrating exercise.