Syntactic Nuts: Hard Cases, Syntactic Theory, and Language Acquisition (review)

This book sheds new light on the place of linguistic theory within cognitive science by investigating the architecture of the language faculty. In particular, it explores what the properties of language reveal about the mental abilities and processes involved in language acquisition. The originality of this book is that it goes against the prevailing trend in generative grammar by considering not only what is general, exceptionless, and universal in language but also what is irregular, exceptional, and idiosyncratic, both in the lexicon and in syntax.

In the first chapter, Culicover discusses the relationship between the study of the learning mechanism for language and the investigation of the properties of language itself as bounding conditions on such a mechanism. He argues that in addition to accounting for linguistic universals, linguistic theory should be able to accept that natural languages are ‘more than simply realizations of combinations of fixed sets of universal properties’ (1). Thus, he focuses on the acquisition of properties that a particular language does not share with other languages. Another question brought up in the first chapter is that of biology vs. learning, namely of how much of linguistic knowledge is biologically determined and how much is learned. Going against the general position, C argues that this question is an empirical one rather than a matter of dogma or ideology. In the last section of the introductory chapter, C identifies two important global properties that a language learner must have: conservatism, which precludes him from generalizing significantly beyond the evidence that is presented to him, and attentiveness, which makes him form generalizations based on all and only the evidence presented to him.

The rest of the book is organized into three chapters that deal with categories, constructions, and constraints, respectively. The first of these chapters presents empirical evidence to support the claim that there is in principle an unbounded set of syntactic categories in natural language. C investigates elements that seem to belong to more than one traditional syntactic category, including either, the prepositional complementizer for, various determiners and quantifiers, and odd prepositions. He argues that such elements form separate categories. On the other hand, their apparent patterning with one or the other of the traditional syntactic categories may be explained from their conceptual structure properties rather than syntactic categorization.

In Ch. 3, C considers a range of syntactic constructions that possess a certain degree of idiosyncrasy, including reduction constructions (e.g. sluicing), movement constructions (e.g. partial wh-movement), and inflections (e.g. do-support). He argues that even though these constructions might normally be taken as part of ‘core’ grammar, some of these aspects cannot be derived from universal principles and therefore must be determined by the learner on the basis of positive experience.

In Ch. 4, C explores some of the consequences of taking the learner to be a conservative attentive learner. He applies the Hawkins Metric to develop a preliminary account of which generalizations are more accessible to the learner on the basis of positive evidence. The goal of this chapter is to provide an understanding of how a learner can acquire constructions that appear to be exceptions to ‘universal’ constraints.

Even though the book is mainly concerned with English, other languages, such as Italian, Icelandic, Hungarian, and French, are discussed as well.