Syntactic Structures
As the first published explication of modern generative grammar, Syntactic Structures (henceforth SS) raised many issues in grammatical theory that have remained lively research topics to this day For this reason alone (re)reading SS is highly rewarding for the perspective it provides on how much has changed over the past 45 years and how much remains essentially the same. Howard Lasnik’s brilliant commentary Syntactic Structures Revisited: Contemporary Lectures on Classic Transformational Theory (henceforth SSR) provides us with just such a rereading.
SSR elucidates SS from three perspectives. Chapter 1, “Structure and Infinity of Human Language,” discusses initial criteria for a theory of language: a notion of structure and a (finite) way to represent infinity, criteria that have remained unchanged. This first chapter also contains an introductory discussion of English verbal morphology, including some descriptive generalizations that a theory of English grammar ought to capture. The second chapter, “Transformational Grammar,” develops transformational analysis as first presented in SS. It considers the properties of transformations (sect. 2.3) and how the rules formulated in SS apply. It goes on to detail some serious theoretical problems for this theory of transformations (sect. 2.6) and additional problems the theory encounters from the perspective of learnability and language acquisition (sect. 2.7), as well as to propose some solutions. The third and final chapter begins with some further problems with the SS analysis (sect. 3.1) and then moves rapidly to succeeding developments in the theory of grammar that address these problems, such as X-bar theory (sect. 3.2) and the notion of the lexicon including subcategorization and selection (sect. 3.3), which led to the more modern analysis of clause structure and thus the verbal system presented in section 3.4. This latter section covers inflection as a syntactic entity, negation, the Head Movement Constraint, and the distinction between main and auxiliary verbs (which is developed further in the brief sect. 3.5), among other topics. The last three sections of this chapter discuss three different analyses of verb movement: Chomsky’s 1991 economy analysis (sect. 3.6), the minimalist approach in Chomsky 1993 (sect. 3.7), and finally Lasnik’s 1995 hybrid analysis (sect. 3.8).
The clarity of the presentation, by now a well-known characteristic of Lasnik’s work, makes this book a pleasure to read.1 Fundamental assumptions and the formal analyses based on them are carefully explicated by application to compelling empirical evidence. The discussion throughout is illuminating, fleshing out background assumptions and details of analyses, and often raising new points. SSR presents the analysis of the verbal morphology system in historical perspective in a way that allows us to appreciate the genius of the SS analysis while at the same time understanding its imperfections and moreover the rationale for the changes embodied in more modern analyses.
At the conclusion of the brief introduction, Lasnik states his belief “that many of the analyses of the 1950s are actually correct, fundamentally and (sometimes) even in detail” (p. 4). In what follows, I would like to consider the contrary view that very little, and perhaps almost nothing at all, survives of the original technical machinery proposed in SS to give an account of the English verbal morphology system. This, of course, requires a rather different analysis of the system than the one Lasnik is proposing. Given his assumptions and analysis, his belief is justified. Furthermore, his analysis is not obviously incorrect. It stands as testimony to the strength of the analytic approach in SS that has dominated our thinking on this topic for almost half a century. Yet it would be essentially miraculous that anyone would get the analysis of so intricate a piece of syntax as the verbal system right on virtually the first attempt, and not at all surprising if a deeper understanding of syntactic theory provided by four decades of research leads to a different and potentially more principled analysis.
This review article will be concerned with three closely interconnected topics (sect. 2 4, respectively): (1) the formal analysis of the English auxiliary system in SS, including Lasnik’s critique of it; (2) Lasnik’s revision of the SS analysis in light of contemporary syntactic theory; and (3) a radical alternative proposal that eliminates the central technical machinery of SS (and Lasnik’s hybrid theory)—namely, the rules of affix hopping and do-support. This latter section is offered as an addendum inspired by the discussion in SSR.
