Occam’s Razor v. Noam Chomsky

Here’s a puzzle for you: Study the four sentences below and provide a rule that explains (a) why the first 3 are correct while the last one (marked with an *) is incorrect, and (b) why sometimes the reflexive pronoun (ending in –self/-selves) appears before its referent (underlined) and sometimes after: Pete shot himself in the foot. Speaking for himself at last, John proposed to Priscilla. The picture of himself on the post office wall disturbed John quite a bit. *Joan told me herself hates chocolate. Shouldn’t that first sentence be as easy to explain as Pete shot Joe in the foot? Maybe so, but generative grammarians have had a heck of a time accounting for reflexives. They have developed a whole line of explanation, known as binding theory, to regulate reflexives and other usages, called anaphora, in which a pronoun or noun phrase always refers to another noun in the same sentence. This blog has never been comfortable with generative theory, mainly because its computational approach omits the possibility of any functional discussion about things like how language works and what’s the good of it. The theory’s trouble with reflexive pronouns has made clear another objection. The solutions generative grammar offers are ad hoc and its method cumbersome. The result is an arbitrary, complex and incomplete account of the perfectly ordinary sentences given above. Going on the assumption that you can’t beat something with nothing, a bit over a year ago I d...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Source Type: blogs