Phrase structure rules from 1965 to

1. 1965 -1986

2. In the 60s and 70s …

3. War in Linguistics

4. Some people doubted Chomsky

5. George Lakoff

6. Isn’t MEANING more important?

7. Can these trees really tell us so much?

8. Aren’t our minds about MEANING?

9. Paul Postal

10. Chomsky is empty

11. James McCawley

12. Generative Semantics

13. John Ross

14. Generative semantics

15. Ray Jackendoff

16. Cognitive Linguistics

17. No universal grammar

18. But Chomsky won!!

19. Syntax (grammar) is MOST
IMPORTANT!

20. Study grammar …

21. … and understand the brain!

22. Trees will tell you about the brain!

23. Chomsky’s grammar was triumphant

24. Unique universal grammar

25. The language faculty

26. How language ability REALLY works

27. Forget about meaning!!

28. Meaning isn’t so important

29. So how can we understand our
language ability?

30. Why is the –ed before the verb?

31. It’s “she walked”

32. Not she “–ed walk”

33. That’s crazy

34. Well, we are looking for universals

35. Look

36. Aux is before the verb

37. The tense bit is BEFORE the verb

38. Before the verb

39. There must be INVISIBLE movement

40. Or it would be untidy

41. So how about OTHER movement?

42. Did she walk?

43. Maybe the tense bit is moving?

44. To an Operator position

45. Makes a question sentence

46. So we’re getting NEW categories

47. Predicate Phrase

48. Predicate Phrase: more complex VP

49. Carries tense, aspect, mood etc

50. And an Operator node

51. Things can move there

52. Change the kind of sentence

53. Did that girl open the door?

54. Magic!

55. Movement

56. So how about OTHER movement?

57. Move one bit

58. Can give us uniformity

59. Any other ways to get uniformity?

60. Because it’s UNIVERSAL grammar

61. Things should be the same

62. X-bar theory

63. XP, X’, X

64. N, N’, NP

65. V, V’, VP

66. P, P’, PP

67. Perfect

68. Everything is the same!

69. No wait!

70. What about S?

71. And what about aux?

72. What are we going to do about aux?

73. Aux, Aux’, AuxP?

74. Well aux carries tense, aspect, mood
etc

75. Aux is the Inflectional information

76. Maybe it’s an INFLECTIONAL phrase?

77. How about like this?

78. All the same!

79. Perfect!