Tal Siloni

This engages with some abstruse matters in Chomskyan syntax, and what you don't need is me reading Chomskyan syntax and hten telling you again even more amply why I detest and execrate it. Basically, garden-path sentences are sentences where at the last word the reading you've constructed as you go along collapses and you have to recoup and re-analyze on the fly, which is different than other types of ambiguity where you kind of hold it all in hand until you figure out what to do with it. show more (The classic example is The horse raced past the barn fell.) This actually makes these sentences a great candidate for some deep syntactic goingover, because you can map them piece by piece and try to find the break and why it happens and why it's irreparable, and you don't have to resort to things like context or communicative intent that fall outside the Chomskyan's purview. The paper's only reason to be in the first place is that fifty years ago a bunch of dicks decided language processing couldn't possibly be related to language production, because the former is a systematic instantiation of hard structures in one's brain whereas the latter is an interpretative dance with another speaker, therefore a matter of linguistic performance and not competence, therefore (in the Chomskyan view) not a matter for "scientific" linguistics. This unparsimonious and deeply insane viewpoint is one that well deserves defamation, and Siloni tries to do so with syntax's own tools, with (to the limited degree I can understand such things) some degree of ingenuity and success. Weirdly, it actually extends the coverage of production, which Chomskyans at least would see as a Chomskyan purview, but the idea that the way we construct sentences affects the way we process them is so deeply plausible that it kind of transcends this sectarian shit. show less