Reflections on Syntax

Joseph Galasso (Ph.D., University of Essex) is on the Linguistics Faculty at California State University, Northridge and also lectures as adjunct at California State University, Long Beach. His main research and publications involve issues surrounding early child syntactic development.

List of Figures and Tables – Preface – Overview – Introduction – Opening Philosophical Questions: Language and Brain Analogies – Preliminary Overview – The ‘Four Sentences’ – Reflections on Syntax – Reasons for Syntactic Movement/‘Four Sentences’ Revisited – The Myth of ‘Function Defines Form’ as the Null-Biological Adaptive Process and the Counter Linguistics-Based Response. (The ‘Accumulative Lecture’) – Poverty of Stimulus – Concluding Remarks. The Dual Mechanism: Studies on Language – A Note on ‘Proto-language’: A Merge-Based Theory of Language Acquisition—Case, Agreement and Word Order Revisited – Concluding Remarks: Lack of Recursion Found in Protolanguage – A Note on the Dual Mechanism Model: Language Acquisition vs. Learning and the Bell-Shape Curve – Overview of Chomsky – Works Cited – List of Terms (informal definitions) – Full References and Web Links – Index.

“This book provides a fascinating and highly individual perspective on language. It deals with a wide range of topics including the philosophy of language, its biological basis and evolution, as well as language acquisition, language disorders, language processing and language universals.” —Andrew Radford, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, University of Essex, United Kingdom

“Joseph Galasso builds a beautiful explanatory edifice that, engagingly, weaves together empirical evidence and current abstract theory of grammar in the best tradition of science: it combines ‘a passion for abstraction with a devotion to detail’. Implications for language acquisition, philosophy and every dimension of ‘biolinguistics’ are skillfully incorporated with a core representation of the concept of recursion. It should be very useful for scholars and students alike.” —Tom Roeper, Professor of Linguistics, UMass, South College