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In this chapter, MacSwan provides an overview of the history of research on codeswitching (CS), distinguishing constraint-based (CB) approaches, which posit explicit rules governing language mixing, from constraint-free (CF) approaches, which seek to derive the facts of language mixing from independently motivated properties of grammar and permit no CS-specific constraints. The chapter documents that CB approaches have generally acknowledged the preference for CF approaches, but have come short of implementation; these studies have (1) explicitly confronted the limitations of the formal mechanism, and reluctantly but explicitly introduce CS-specific devices; (2) left the analytic framework inexplicit or inadequately developed so that the issue did not arise; or (3) proposed explicit CS-specific mechanisms, and argued that they are vacuously available to monolinguals too. MacSwan argues that early lexical insertion in the Minimalist Program resolves technological limitations associated with prior models which prevented implementation of a CF solution to CS. Illustrations, offered as proof of concept for the utility of the CF approach, are presented.

This introductory chapter defines the book’s goals and shows how they are relevant to current issues in linguistics and psycholinguistics. Topics discussed include the Performance–Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis (PGCH), predictions of PGCH, issues of explanation, and the challenge of multiple preferences.

The word ‘justify’ had undergone extraordinary travails by the time Milton came to use it. This chapter starts by presenting the necessary fall. English grammatical theory in the seventeenth century was only beginning to acquire the terminology to conceptualize the problem, never mind resolve it. In grammatical theory, Milton himself was a conservative. He devised textbooks for his nephews and other pupils on both grammar and logic, which in his penurious post-Restoration old age he published. In the devious and errant paths of Milton's syntax, language reveals its inevitable ambivalence. In this, as much as in Milton's dogmatic assurances, Paradise Lost is an archetypal Reformation artefact. It is also the crowning laurel in the contribution of the Reformation to the English language and its literature.

This chapter provides a survey of some work in generative linguistics over the past 45 years. The survey is not intended to be comprehensive, but is designed to give a flavor of some of the examples and topics that are addressed in this book, including the role of data, simplicity, and abstract linguistic forms in grammatical theory, from Chomsky's ‘Standard Theory’ to ‘Government-Binding Theory’ to the ‘Minimalist Program’.

Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. This chapter examines these arguments and shows that they depend on inaccurate assumptions about biology or language or both. Evolutionary theory offers clear criteria for when a trait should be attributed to natural selection: complex design for some function, and the absence of alternative processes capable of explaining such complexity. Human language meets this criterion: grammar is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional structures through a serial interface. In conclusion, there is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by a conventional neo-Darwinian process.

This chapter presents a discussion on kāraka. An important feature of Pāṇinian grammatical theory is the distinction it draws between the superficial grammatical form of a sentence, and a deeper level of structure, known as the kāraka level. A kāraka is a semantic relation between the verb and a noun. It closely resembles the participant roles or thematic roles of modern case grammar. The Instrument, Target, and Donor are the three thematic roles distinguished by the Indians. The Nyāya analysis of an Instrument is the most problematic of all the kārakas. Udayana is an important transitional figure in the history of Indian philosophy. He wants the primitive terms in his semantic theory to correspond with the basic entities in his ontology, and attempts to ensure the correspondence by having a semantic criterion for something to be a basic entity.

This chapter offers an account of what the grammarian is saying of an expression when he says it is grammatical, or a noun phrase, or ambiguous, or the subject of a certain sentence. More generally, it gives an account of the nature of a generative grammatical theory of a language—of the data for such a theory, the relation between the theory and the data, and the relation between the theory and a speaker of the language. It addresses two questions: Of what interest is a grammar? If a grammar is not, in any exciting sense, a theory of a language, why bother constructing it?

This chapter investigates wh-items in Mandarin from a cross-linguistic perspective, seeking to unify their various uses. It stems from: (i) previous approaches to indefinites in Chinese (Cheng 1991; Lin 1998); (ii) Kartunnen’s semantics for questions; (iii) recent work on epistemic indefinites (EIs); and (iv) recent approaches to polarity (e.g. Chierchia 2013). The chapter claims that indefinites in all languages denote existential terms and activate a grammatically determined set of alternatives, factored into meaning through a process of ‘exhaustification’, responsible for the scalar and ‘free choice’ readings of ordinary indefinites (OIs). EIs are viewed in the same way, the only difference from OIs being that EIs’ alternatives cannot be ‘pruned’ (i.e. ‘ignored’) depending on the context. Therefore, with EIs, epistemic effects come about obligatorily. The differences within types of EIs (including Chinese wh’s) are part of (a small set of) parametric differences on how alternatives can be factored in.