David's career so far (00:55)
How this book came about (03:36)
What is "substance"? Nouns vs. verbs (07:30)
OGRE (the Optionality Generalization for Relational Expressions) (11:12)
The PP Peripherality Generalization (17:21)
Possessors (23:12)
Weird-looking unary branching trees (27:40)
Eliminating functional heads from the lexicon (34:36)
How to derive the functional sequence (37:48)
How labelling works (45:46)
Labelling as an operation: how did it evolve? (49:14)
The loci of variation in this system (53:15)
Grammaticalization as "rootification" (59:43)
Upcoming projects (01:02:18)
Nouns are the bread and butter of linguistic analysis, and it’s easy not to reflect too hard on what they actually are and how they work. In A Syntax of Substance (MIT Press, 2013), David Adger tackles this question, as well as others that are just as fundamental to the way we think about syntax. The book takes nouns to specify “substances”, and Adger defends the view that nouns, unlike verbs, never take arguments. Moreover, he marshals evidence to show that some of the constituents that have been traditionally taken to be arguments of nouns, such as the PP “of Mary” in “the picture of Mary”, are actually not that closely connected to the noun syntactically at all. But the book’s not just about nouns: it presents a radically innovative way of building and labelling phrase structure within Minimalism, denying the existence of functional heads and allowing unary branching trees.
In this interview we talk about the differences between nouns and verbs, and the evidence for this difference from a variety of languages, in particular Scottish Gaelic. After outlining the theoretical machinery that David deploys in order to account for these facts, we then move on to discuss the status of hierarchies of functional categories and the implications of this new syntactic system for cross-linguistic variation, grammaticalization, and the evolution of language.
Interview for the New Books Network: [ Ссылка ]
You can order the book here: [ Ссылка ]
