But other transformations can get at "book", e.g. anaphors: "I have a red book and you have a green one."akam chinjir wrote: ↑Sat Jul 06, 2019 11:26 pmSure, but you're not generally free to move whatever constituents you want however you want. E.g., you can't move "book" from inside "the book" (*Whatᵢ did you read the ___ᵢ?), but presumably you think of "the" and "book" as being put together in syntax.
Well, arguably they don't. Where they contrast, synthetic causatives are looser, e.g. allowing much more indirect causation.I suppose the main conceptual gain is that you can say things like: the reason why analytic and synthetic causatives have the same semantics is that they have the same underlying syntactic structure.
It goes the other way round for me: a T node is ancient in syntax. It's an essential part of the clever (though wrong) Syntactic Structures analysis, and it's hard to do English syntax without it. I'm much less convinced it's a good idea in (say) Quechua. Or Mandarin.Of course you get arguments of other sorts too. It's a big simplicity gain if you can treat word-building in syntax with minimal additional stipulation. And if you've accepted (for example) that an incorporated noun got prefixed to the verb in syntax, it's easy to conclude that a tense marker that's prefixed to the noun+verb combination also gets added by syntax.
I haven't read Baker so I can't comment on that.
As for simplicity in general, it's worth looking at other theories to see how much simplicity you can get with different assumptions. Valence and arguments are far simpler in Relational Grammar and in Word Grammar. Cullicover & Jackendoff's Simpler Syntax gets by with no transformations at all, instead placing more work on the semantic side. (Plug: these are covered in my book. Or for an overview that's not me, cf Van Valin, "An Introduction to Syntax".)
