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

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

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

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

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

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

I have no quarrel with the idea that a language user has a mental ‘lexicon’.  But I am impatient that no linguist has satisfactorily defined the lexicon’s logical content or its physical implementation.  This piece fearlessly tackles the logical aspect. Read more

Last time we looked at how a word-word junction delivers an atom of meaning to cognition.  This time we’ll see how the set of junctions in a sentence builds up a whole molecule of meaning. Read more

This unscheduled post contains my responses to several points in a comment on NG7 by HK.  I’ve also included responses to points about anaphor binding and agreement in an earlier comment on NG6 by HK.

Answering some of the points needed a wider range of formatting options than I’ve been able to get for comments from the WordPress software.  (If anyone knows better, please let me know.)  Therefore this is a separate post. Read more

NG7 claimed that all knowledge is held in the mind as propositions, each linking three concepts.  I can offer no supporting neuroscience.  Instead this piece presents some anecdotal evidence from my old-time software work which suggests at least that the position is defensible logically. Read more