Re: Good syntax books
Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2018 1:07 am
Ooh, I wish I'd had that resource on Old Chinese before. Oh well, there are always 2nd editions.
It's tricky... one thing I don't like about some of the syntax textbooks I've read is the foreign language examples! The thing is... I believe in doing syntax, not just learning a particular formalism. That means not taking things for granted, checking the evidence, learning to make and evaluate syntactic arguments. And it's very hard to do syntax on a language you don't speak natively.
So, not to pick on Carnie, but he tries to motivate some X-bar movements using data from Irish and French. But, a) how do you evaluate those if you don't know both languages well, and b) how does that prove that his analysis is correct for English?
But I hear you, and I am providing non-English examples (hopefully some really interesting ones) to show non-English syntactic data.
I have plenty of neat facts generative grammarians have found, but I can't say I have a lot of things only generative grammar can explain. I'd be happy to hear suggestions. The one area I've found GG essential for in my own conlangs is in explaining subordination (of all sorts). (In natlangs, it's hard to explain English do-support, or Mandarin pivot sentences, without it.)
It's tricky... one thing I don't like about some of the syntax textbooks I've read is the foreign language examples! The thing is... I believe in doing syntax, not just learning a particular formalism. That means not taking things for granted, checking the evidence, learning to make and evaluate syntactic arguments. And it's very hard to do syntax on a language you don't speak natively.
So, not to pick on Carnie, but he tries to motivate some X-bar movements using data from Irish and French. But, a) how do you evaluate those if you don't know both languages well, and b) how does that prove that his analysis is correct for English?
But I hear you, and I am providing non-English examples (hopefully some really interesting ones) to show non-English syntactic data.
I have plenty of neat facts generative grammarians have found, but I can't say I have a lot of things only generative grammar can explain. I'd be happy to hear suggestions. The one area I've found GG essential for in my own conlangs is in explaining subordination (of all sorts). (In natlangs, it's hard to explain English do-support, or Mandarin pivot sentences, without it.)