Questions of Syntax

About this book

"There are far more syntactically distinct languages than we might have thought. Yet there are far fewer than there might have been. We need to understand why, in both cases. One common and relevant theme that runs through these chapters, with varying degrees of explicitness, concerns how wide a range of questions the field of syntax can reasonably attempt to ask and then answer. At issue, among other things, are the relation between syntax and (certain aspects of) semantics, the relation between syntax and what appear to be lexical questions, the relation between syntax and morphology, the relation between syntax and certain aspects of phonology (insofar as silent elements and their properties play a substantial role) and the extent to which comparative syntax can provide new and decisive evidence bearing on these different kinds of questions. More and more questions need to be asked, if we are to achieve depth of explanation. Comparative syntax provides evidence bearing on questions which are not initially comparative in nature. It is extremely fruitful to search for correlations across syntactic differences as a means of establishing a new kind of window into the language faculty. Micro-comparative syntax is an especially powerful tool that allows us to probe questions concerning the most primitive units of syntactic variation, and whose growth in recent decades is to be compared with the development of the earliest microscopes, . Comparative syntax sheds light on what might at first appear to be lexical questions, as in the case of transitive verbal need, whose cross-linguistic distribution is less arbitrary that it appears to be, when viewed in the context of a silent counterpart of have"--