ENGLISH

A Theory of Syntax: Minimal Operations and Universal Grammar

By Norbert Hornstein

Book information

Year
2009
ISBN
0521449707, 9780521449700, 9780511465147
LCC
P291 .H662 2009
Open Library ID
OL17031299M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
1 MB (1326417 bytes)
Pages
204\206
Scanned
yes
Time added
2011-06-04 13:46:07

Description

Human language seems to have arisen roughly within the last 50-100,000 years. In evolutionary terms, this is the mere blink of an eye. If this is correct, then much of what we consider distinctive to language must in fact involve operations available in pre-linguistic cognitive domains. In this book Norbert Hornstein, one of the most influential linguists working on syntax, discusses a topical set of issues in syntactic theory, including a number of original proposals at the cutting edge of research in this area. He provides a theory of the basic grammatical operations and suggests that there is only one that is distinctive to language. If this theory is correct then this narrows the evolutionary gap between verbal and non-verbal primates, thus facilitating the rapid evolutionary emergence of our linguistic capacity.

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