akam chinjir wrote: ↑Sun Jun 28, 2020 2:23 amOh, on the first point, here's an interesting list of
significant mid-level results of generative linguistics that a group of linguists came up with a few years ago.
Actually, if you read that, you might notice that the structure-dependence of binding is on the list. Does analysing things in terms of structure count as a tool? C-command in particular? Cyclicity? Those are pretty fundamental to how most syntacticians go about things, at least. (Whereas linear order isn't part of the usual toolkit.)
Oh, by all means, those three things (structure-dependence of binding, c-command, cyclicity) are definitely discoveries of Generative Grammar research! I don't mean to say that it hasn't discovered many things, including important things. Binding before GG was only talked about as going from an individual word to an antecedent as if the antecedent existed as an idea (maybe because ungrammaticality wasn't taken too seriously; often the response to such a thing was 'it's not attested', 'people don't say that', than saying something was
ungrammatical). Islands were also a discovery of GG research I think, even if that article doesn't list them as their own item.
What I am observing or maybe better complaining about is that some of these things GG syntacticians attribute as discoveries of GG were already talked about, decades before, in the grammars of particular languages. It seems to me they became notions in general linguistics with GG because linguistics had also just recently gotten started when the GG program started... I appreciate that "transformations" is not on the list of your link, but I've definitely heard that from some of said people. That old grammars (of which Allen & Greenough is just an example) don't get credit for them mostly just reflects that they were aimed at people in other areas (like Classics as a field of literature and archeology in that case), since linguistics didn't exist much as its own thing yet in 1903. I notice that authors of Latin/Greek grammars these days tend to come from a linguistics background now, e.g. the authors of the recent
Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek (2018).
As for the approaches that Ser mentioned that I guess don't count as frameworks, I don't know that not offering university courses about a thing counts as pretending a thing doesn't exist. Like, say, if you looked at Kayne's book on French syntax, are there relevant phenomena he misses or mistakes he makes because he doesn't pay attention to that work? (That's assuming he doesn't, I don't know either way.)
It's not so much about "relevant" phenomena being missed, but about the lack of acknowledgement of the massively common model used to talk about syntax in the world in syntax courses and books at English-speaking universities, since the lion's share of the field seems to be taken by people who follow old Chomsky or new Chomsky. Open about every reference grammar for language learners, and the model used is that other one.
(Regarding old Chomsky, even though explicit talk about transformations from D-Structure to S-Structure (or LP to FP) seem to be gone to a large or complete extent, new research keeps coming out using X-bar theory, like this article from 2018 on the merits of DP vs. NP in Estonian, a language without articles, largely concerned about which one out of a (non-article) determiner or a main noun is worth selecting as the specifier or head. Note part of the author's argument involves changes in sentences in transformations...)
Dixon, who bradrn mentioned, does begin vol. 1 of
Basic Linguistic Theory talking about it (§1.2, pages 1-4), in what I'd call an attack against formal theorists by misrepresenting them as failing at their analyses of parts of a language's grammar by not considering it whole or by using very different approaches from each other (for one, this can also be said of people of the "basic linguistic" model!, try reading two grammars of a sub-saharan African language by two different authors sometime... and he himself complains about this later on). He also says something about BLT descending from Greek and Sanskrit grammarians' thought, but that's true of anything... Strangely enough, in most of the rest of the three volumes he mostly talks about typology and practical language documentation rather than focusing on the model itself or the history of the model though.
Regarding "relevant" phenomena missed because of not paying attention to such other work, I've heard complaints about the lack of coverage of a given language's grammar in syntactic discussions even from Chomskian syntacticians themselves, so that's not something I was thinking of bringing up. I've heard of it in terms of not talking about enough "types of sentences".
I don't know about Kayne's book (I just saw it's a nice long one, 490 pp.), but e.g. a few times I've tried to find discussions by Chomskians on the Spanish sentence-initial
que, specifically in the uses that don't involve
3rd-person imperatives, since I think they'd come up with interesting arguments about that, and so far I have failed.
Que is the general subordinator, appearing in noun clauses (subject, object or else:
que, de que, a que, en que), relative clauses (
que, lo que, por el que, en el que) and adverbial clauses (
a la vez que, mientras que, después de que), but sentence-initially it also marks 3rd-person imperatives, and also, of my interest:
- Complaints (with no imperative component at all):
Que nos haya pasado esto, con todo lo que nos esforzamos... 'It's depressing that this happened to us, considering how much effort we put into it...'
- Conditionals (has to be sentence-initial unlike other constructions of conditions, and is also intonationally quite a bit separate but IMO not completely):
¿Que todavía no está listo?, pues apurémoslo. 'So he's not ready? Let's hurry him up. ~ If he's really not ready, let's hurry him up.'
Que se lo crea, que no se lo crea, igual me da. 'Whether she believes it or not, anyway I don't care.'
- Summaries (often with an introductory adverbial):
Es decir, que nos hacen falta ingredientes '(after a long rant) In other words, we're basically missing ingredients.'
- To emphasize that something is true:
—Sí. —No. —¡Que sí! —¡Que no! "Yes." "No." "Yes, really!" "No, really!"
—Los compré. —No, se te olvidaron. —¡Que (sí) los compré! "I bought them." "No, you forgot about them." "I really bought them!"
- As
a que, to try to convince (including of insults):
A que te termina gustando 'I'm telling you, you'll end up liking it',
¿A que sabe increíble? 'Do you see, it tastes amazing!'
¡A que eres idiota! 'I'm telling you, you're such an idiot!'
The RAE does talk about this in its grammar. I actually just checked one of their works to remember all these uses.
BTW, I found your comment and zompist's comment about the usefulness of a framework helpful. Also, the list you linked to said something about the potential great scope of quantifiers, which also reminded me of something nice about Classical Chinese 皆, 或 and 莫 I should've mentioned in
this other thread...
Anyway topicalisation isn't the only pattern here (I don't know if it's even an especially common one). There's also focus, and I'm pretty sure you can get scrambling where the different word orders don't seem to have any semantic or pragmatic difference.