Customer Reviews

Simpler Syntax

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The title 'Simpler Syntax' means simpler than syntax as implemented in Chomskyan mainstream generative grammar. The book is not at all simple, and readers who are not already familiar with arcane linguistic concepts such as c-command, theta roles, pied-piping, and pro-drop, will soon become lost. I'm not a linguist, but I've tried to follow mainstream linguistics over the years and I could follow enough of this book to see that the authors were saying something very important, despite the complexity of the arguments, which were illustrated with alternative analyses of a wide range of linguistic constructions.
The authors have in-depth knowledge of Chomskyan theory and what they've done here is to argue that it went wrong years ago in some of its foundational assymptions. They reject core notions, such as the idea that branching is binary, that movement is involved in syntactic derivations, that there is a distinction between periphery and core, and that syntax is the sole generative component. The result is that the syntax gets a lot simpler, though the semantics gets more complicated. For a psychologist the argument they present is very persuasive: their analyses are intuitively far more appealing than the fiendishly complex syntactic trees that you get from mainstream generative grammar - one can get a sense of how children might learn a language conceptualised this way, and how the brain might process it. This is essentially a processing account. The numerous examples are pretty challenging for the reader, but I can see they are essential to make the case - and they demonstrate a remarkable range of knowledge and depth of scholarship in the authors.
Finally, a very unusual feature, for a book in this field, is that the authors attempt to compare and contrast different linguistic approaches, noting what is useful about different analyses, and avoiding the kind of confrontational argument that all too often has led to overheated and sterile debate.
I had always felt uncomfortable with the sheer implausibility of Chomskyan accounts of language and its acquisition: this book explains why and offers an alternative.

The description tells you that,

"This groundbreaking book offers a new and compelling perspective on the structure of human language."

Its true, it is a compelling perspective and in many ways, its groundbreaking too. But its not a new perspective. In fact, the view of the authors is incredibly similar to the views that alternative generativists have putting forward for decades. The book talks about rejecting deep structure - Role and Reference Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar did that decades ago. It talks about using parallel constrains as a basis of its theory - that's been LFG's statement for decades and its also a concept that the authors have contributed to since the the late 70's and early 80's at least (Granted, Jackendoff and Culicover have been talking about a parallel architecture for quite a while too). It talks about positing an abstract structure distinct from the constituent structure - LFG already did that too. And RRG maps the meaning in their abstract structure straight onto their tree diagrams for a hybrid syntactic, semantic, relational structure, so in a sense so have they.

Jackendoff & Culicover have always been more "out of the box" in their thinking compared to "mainstream" (i.e. Chomskyan) generative grammar--even though both have made significant contributions to it as well. I give this book four stars instead of five because I grow ever weary of the multiplication of linguistic frameworks/"theories." Simpler Syntax demonstrates how other frameworks can be modeled in formalism their proposing, but I'm less than confident about the benefits of having *another* formalism.

With that said, the introduction and its survey of the history of generative grammar and the problems of the Chomskyan program so absolutely fantastic. That section of the book deserves 5+ stars.

Perhaps in the end, what we have more is an excellent book with some overly zealous marketing copy written up by Oxford.