
NG1. Why Noam Chomsky should read this blog
56 years is a long time for doing something. Beethoven’s age at death. And Hitler’s. But modern linguistics, born of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures, is now 57. Is it also dead or just languishing? Anyway it hasn’t delivered the killer theory. OK, there’s a lot else to linguistics but, as Rutherford said, that’s stamp-collecting, not physics. Read more

NG2. What does sentence structure signify?
This is the first substantive piece for LanguidSlog. It’s quite short and should be easy for the reader. Books on syntax typically jump straight into tree diagrams or nested brackets to represent sentence structure. The graphical conventions are not difficult. But the purpose of those representations isn’t self-evident. Let’s look at some issues. Read more

NG3. What would be in a sentence structure?
Last time we looked at how sentence structure could participate in production or comprehension. For that to happen it must exist somehow in the mental architecture. This piece outlines what the structure must contain during its brief existence. Read more

NG4. How could a sentence structure be formed?
LanguidSlog 3 outlined the items needed in a sentence structure. It was rather long but not too difficult to follow, I hope. This one is much shorter but nonetheless may require some thought. It looks more closely at how junctions are formed in real time, concluding that the story is a bit implausible. Read more

NG5. Mental architecture
Transient-items-with-pointers (from the analogy with computer software in the last piece) would be a blatant straw-man if it misrepresented existing theories. But no theory really explains how sentence structure is implemented and, in this piece, knocking down the idea is perfectly legitimate. Read more

NG6. A transformation for grammar
Are any real syntacticians following Network Grammar? If so, most are about to become alienated. I hope that, for at least a few, the alienation is not from the blog but from their previous beliefs. Read more