LINGUIST List 17.2304
Fri Aug 11 2006
Disc: Re: 17.2277: Disc: Modern Syntactic Theory
Editor for this issue: Ann Sawyer
<sawyerlinguistlist.org>
Directory
1. Martin
Haspelmath,
Major Discoveries of Modern Syntactic Theory
Message 1: Major Discoveries of Modern Syntactic Theory
Date: 11-Aug-2006
From: Martin Haspelmath <haspelmatheva.mpg.de>
Subject: Major Discoveries of Modern Syntactic Theory
In my view, the major discovery of post-1957 ''syntactic theory'' is not''theoretical'', but methodological: That a huge amount of generalizationscan best be found by adopting an ''experimental'' approach. In the 19thcentury and the first half of the 20th, syntacticians almost exclusivelyworked with corpora, and thus were limited to an ''observational''approach. But just as morphological description requires elicitation to getcomplete paradigms (in many languages), so does syntactic description, toget the full richness of the ''syntactic paradigms'' (in all languages).
(Let us hope that this lesson will not be forgotten, now that corpus-basedapproaches are becoming more prominent again, for good reasons having to dowith technological innovations.)
In addition to this methodological discovery, there were many claims about''theories'', ''principles'', ''architectures'', and so on, but these havealways been largely speculative, and unlikely to stand the test of time.
What remains of the published body of research is the empirical part. Soall the papers that are neatly divided into a ''data/generalizations'' partand an ''analysis'' part have a good chance of continuting to be useful:Future linguists can read the first part and stop reading where theanalysis begins.
Martin Haspelmath
(P.S. It's odd to say that ''modern syntax'' started with Saussure, as doesEverett, because Saussure did not really work on syntax. I think it'sfairer to say that it started with Delbrück's comparative Indo-Europeansyntax, although this was pre-structuralist.)
Linguistic Field(s):
Syntax
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