Quote:
Originally Posted by browser2920
Holy ****! I always wondered what types of things English Phd candidates chose for their dissertations. I figured there wasnt much left to figure out about Shakespeare and other great writers. But god damn, that's one esoteric paper.
Essentially they're arguing that a theory of imperatives deserves a special place within Chomskian syntax (or more accurately what is called the "Minimalist Program") which is basically the idea that if there is a such a thing as a "Universal Grammar" that underlies all human language, then the theories that underlie it need to be as basic as possible to account for the large amount of variation that exist in the 7,000+ extant languages.
Most of the stuff that you'll find the most esoteric is what is called
X bar theory, which is basically just a way of understanding tree diagrams.
When we diagram sentences the nodes on the diagram are what are called "phrases". E.g., a verb phrase ("paint the fence"), which contains the verb "paint" and the noun phrase (or more accurately the determiner phrase) "the fence". There are also adjective phrases, prepositional phrases and other more exotic phrases like "topic phrase" ("As for the fence I'd like it painted")-- where "as for the fence" would be the topic phrase.
Languages can either be subject prominent or topic prominent. English and all other languages dervied from Indo-European are subject prominent, but languages like Japanese and Korean are topic prominent. In Japanese you begin with the topic first and then say what you want to say about it.
You would't say "I like beer" in Japanese (you could), but more natural would be something like:
"biru-wa suki desu" (as for beer, like is), where there is no subject but it's assumed to be the speaker and could be translated as "I like beer")-- but when you diagram the Japanese sentence it's going to look very different from its Engish counterpart because it's beginning with the topic whereas English begins with the subject.
But since according to the ideas of Universal Grammar we know there must only be one schema that accounts for all languages, then we know that English still does have a "topic phrase" slot just that it's not often filled.
Their argument is that just like the topic-phrase slot, that there is also an "Imperative phrase" that would fit somewhere (between "Force" and "Topic") in figure 3 of that paper, and they go through and give a history of other theories of imperatives and make their arguments for why such an "Imperative phrase" exists.