Workshop on the Limits of Syntax, Columbus, Ohio, Fall 1995

摘要在过去的35年里，生成语法学家在理解人类语言方面取得了很大的进展，他们用句法术语描述了非常广泛的语言现象。这项研究的重点是发展阐明说话者能力的理论，并导致了许多有趣和成功的跨语言异同预测。然而，随着这一研究纳入了更多种类的语言内部和跨语言数据，越来越清楚的是，某些现象已经被广泛接受的句法解释（例如，对问题形成的限制或代词的分布）很可能无法仅从句法角度进行分析，而不会对句法理论本身的解释价值产生不良影响。因此，有必要认真探讨如何将非句法解释更多地纳入语言学研究，从而加深我们对有问题的语言现象的理解，同时加强句法理论。我们将举办一个研讨会作为这种探索的论坛，其总体目标如下：确定明确和令人信服的论点，即特定语言现象的某些或所有方面必须或不能从句法上进行分析；识别和评估自然语言现象的非句法分析的具体建议；候选非句法分析对句法理论的启示并探索语言现象的非句法分析是否以及如何可以在“可参数化”理论中表达，该理论可以涵盖不同类型的语言。研讨会将探讨的主题包括：提取的约束、限定变量回指和动作的“触发”。这些例子都有可能被一个或多个关于句子信息重要性的理论——尤其是它们的预设属性和信息表达——所阐释。

SBR-9507805 CULICOVER ABSTRACT Over the past thirty-five years, generative grammarians have made a great deal of progress in understanding human language by characterizing a very wide range of linguistic phenomena in syntactic terms. This inquiry has focused on developing theories that illuminate speaker competence and it has led to many interesting and successful predictions about cross-linguistic similarities and differences. However, as this reqearch has grown to incorporate a greater variety of within-language and cross-linguistic data, it has become increasingly clear that certain phenomena that have been given widely accepted syntactic explanations (for instance, constraints on question formation or the distribution of pronouns) quite possibly cannot be analyzed in exclusively syntactic terms without an undesirable impact on the explanatory value of the syntactic theories themselves. Consequently, it is essential to explore seriously the question of how the greater incorporation of nonsyntactic explanations into linguistic research could deepen our understanding of problematic linguistic phenomena and, at the same time, strengthen syntactic theory. We will hold a workshop as a forum for such an exploration, with the following overarching goals: identifying clear and convincing arguments that some or all aspects of a given linguistic phenomenon must or cannot be analyzed syntactically; identifying and evaluating specific proposals for nonsyntactic analyses of natural language phenomena; exploring the implications of candidate nonsyntactic analyses for syntactic theory; and exploring whether and how nonsyntactic analyses of linguistic phenomena can be expressed in a "parameterizable" theory that can cover typologically diverse languages. Among the topics to be explored in the workshop will be: constraints on extraction, bound variable anaphora, and th e "triggering" of movement. These examples all share the potential of being illuminated by a theory or theories of the informational import of sentences -particularly their presuppositional properties and informational articulation.