Thanks for visiting this site, the purpose of which is to display proposed solutions to problems in modern theoretical linguistics (syntax in particular) which have been around for a while. This site is premised upon the expectation that the mysteries of language will be unravelled not by recourse to hidden, hypothetical, imaginary or invisible structures, machinations or symbols, nor by the attribution to language of anthropomorphic traits but, rather, solely and exclusively by a detailed examination of the written and spoken word. The method is to use plain English throughout. No academic jargon, no terms of art, no theoretical symbols, postulations or formulas. And that, obviously, is why I call this approach "post-theoretical".
The first article - "I Came, I Saw, I Repaired an Island" - is about sluicing and ellipsis. This one has been around since 1969 when the legendary John Ross, then a student of Professors Paul Postal and Noam Chomsky, brought it to the attention of the MIT department of linguistics. Quite a few professional theoretical linguists have worked on it since. My goal here is to make the problems and, hopefully, the solutions - if in fact I have arrived at the proper solutions - accessible to college-level linguistics students and to fellow amateurs.
The next article forthcoming is "Lasnik's 'Case and Expletives Revisited' Revisited", based upon a work of Professor Howard Lasnik. This one will cover territory which has been plowed many times, including in Professor Chomsky's "The Minimalist Program". Look for that later in the summer of 2007.
And the ones after that will be on the subjects of anaphora and reflexives: "Anaphora Itself"; a look at complementizers, drawing heavily on works by Professors Postal and Lasnik; and finally, a look at the grammar vs. usage debate which has been raging for several years in the pages of "Language", courtesy of Professor Newmeyer and a host of others.
