Dale Lightfoot
Biographic Data
| ID | 629269 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dale Lightfoot |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dale |
| FAMILY NAME | Lightfoot |
| SIGNATURE | LIGHTFOOT D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Maryland, College Park |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2591-981X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 84 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1972 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Problems with variable properties in syntax
Like those birds born to chirp, humans are born to parse; children are predisposed to assign linguistic structures to the amorphous externalization of the thoughts that we encounter. This yields a view of variable properties quite different from one based on parameters defined at Universal Grammar (UG). Our approach to language acquisition makes two contributions to Minimalist thinking. First, in accordance with general Minimalist goals, we minim…
English
Reviewed by: English: The language of the Vikings by Joseph Embley Emonds and Jan Terje Faarlund David W. Lightfoot English: The language of the Vikings. By Joseph Embley Emonds and Jan Terje Faarlund. (Olomouc modern language monographs 3.) Olomouc: Palacký University, 2014. Pp. 180. ISBN 9788024443829. English has horrendous orthography, an extremely complicated inventory of vowels, a few hundred irregular verbs, a huge vocabulary, and other fe…
Types of explanation in history
This article examines the ways in which explanation has been achieved in scientific work on language change over the last two hundred years. Explanations have come in many forms and at many levels and are greatly influenced by what are taken as the leading questions, which themselves have varied significantly since the early nineteenth century
Verb Movement
Social and behavioral scientists building cyberinfrastructure
None Available
Language Acquisition and Language Change
Children acquire a mature language system and sometimes this system differs from that of their parents. This is a significant part of language change and understanding acquisition is key to understanding this kind of change in people's internal grammars. We outline an approach to language acquisition that is based on children finding cues and microcues expressed in the input they are exposed to. This enables us to understand historical change in …
The ecology of languages
This paper discusses the life-cycle of languages: languages die, new languages are born, and languages undergo radical changes in form and structure. This paper considers three changes in the history of English: loss of split genitives, introduction of new inflectional categories, and loss of verb movement. The proposal is that these changes are the result of children's reanalysis during language acquisition, based on the interaction between prim…
Minimizing government
The rigors of the Minimalist Program eliminate movement operations, traces, and 1980s-style conditions of government. This article emphasizes poverty-of-stimulus problems, reviews lexical government effects, and captures them (and more) by treating certain deletion as cliticization. This analysis carves up the grammatical world differently, linking former “movement” conditions with phonological reductions, VP ellipsis, gapped verbs, some agreemen…
Biology and language
In a recent review article in this journal, Everett (2005) finds our book Anderson & Lightfoot (2002) (as well as Givón 2002) seriously lacking and unpersuasive in the case it attempts to make for the importance of an understanding of the human language faculty as an aspect of our species' biology. Negative reviews are of course a feature of academic life, but Everett's piece exhibits enough misconceptions and misrepresentations, both of our work…
Abstraction and performance
Preview this article: Abstraction and performance: Commentary on Fischer, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/sl.28.3.22lig-1.gif
Learning from creoles
Motives for Language Change
This specially commissioned volume considers the processes involved in language change and the issues of how they can be modelled and studied. The way languages change offers an insight into the nature of language itself, its internal organisation, and how it is acquired and used. Accordingly, the phenomenon of language change has been approached from a variety of perspectives by linguists of many different orientations. This book, originally pub…
Myths and the prehistory of grammars
Only a small number of the world's languages have any kind of recorded history over more than a few generations, and in no case do records go back more than a few thousand years. From some perspectives, this doesn't matter. There are plenty of grammars to write and plenty of changes to describe accurately and then to explain in these recorded histories. Explanations for structural changes may be grounded in grammatical theory, and careful examina…
More myths
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Evolutionary Emergence of Language
Language has no counterpart in the animal world. Unique to Homo sapiens, it appears inseparable from human nature. But how, when and why did it emerge? The contributors to this volume - linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and others - adopt a modern Darwinian perspective which offers a bold synthesis of the human and natural sciences. As a feature of human social intelligence, language evolution is driven by biologically anomalous l…
How long was the nineteenth century
This paper reviews the problems of the deterministic and predictive view of language change initiated by nineteenth century linguists and shows that such a view is still present in many analyses proposed by twentieth century linguists. As an alternative to such a view, the paper discusses an approach along the lines of Niyogi and Berwick (1997), which takes the explanation for long-term tendencies to be a function of the architecture of UG and th…
Perceiving the Fictional World of Nesmrtelnost Through Kundera’s “I”
Kundera's characters have always struggled both with images and identities they have constructed for themselves and that others have constructed for them. Since Milan Kundera's emigration to France, much of his fiction has explored such struggles through dialogical split between youthful characters who live in the fragile world of lyrical self-expression and definition, and cynical narrator, literary representative of the author, who resides in w…
Lightfoot replies
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Response to David Lightfoot's Review of The Emergence and Development of SVO Patterning in Latin and French
The Emergence ancl Development of SVO Patterning in Latin and French: Diachronic and Psycholinguistic Perspectives.Lightfoot criticizes ideas that are not in the book and also provides inaccurate analyses of its contents.In addition» he places the work in a biological frame it does not have, thus over looking the principal contribution of the work.The book analyzes a major syntactic change and accounts for it by referring to psycholinguistic evid…
Catastrophic change and learning theory
The Emergence and Development of SVO Patterning in Latin and French
This book analyses-in terms of branching-the pervasive reorganization of Latin syntactic and morphological structures: in the development from Latin to French, a shift can be observed from the archaic, left-branching structures (which Latin inherited from Proto-Indo-European) to modern right-branching equivalents. Brigitte Bauer presents a detailed analysis of this development based on the theoretical discussion and definition of and head. Subseq…
Grammars for people
TWO VIEWS OF GRAMMAR For many years, many people have used the term ‘grammar’ to indicate something which represents an individual's mature linguistic capacity and which arises in the mind/brain of that individual on exposure to some relevant childhood experience. The grammar interacts with other aspects of a person's mental make-up, in a modular conception of mind. Different experiences may give rise to different grammars in different individual…
The cultural ecology of Puebloan Pebble-Mulch gardens
Government
Review article of Luigi Rizzi, Revitalized minimality. (Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 16.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Pp. x + 147
Subjacency and sex
Mechanisms of Syntactic Change
Predication and Pro
The comprehensive theory of predication developed by Williams (1980, 1982, 1983) subsumes a wide range of phenomena, but contains some internal problems. An alternative account is presented here which does not postulate a distinct level of Predicate Structure, but assumes that pro may be governed. This entails new analyses of small clauses and control phenomena, and leads to a revision of the conditions under which empty elements may occur
Catastrophic change and learning theory
Language Acquisition and Language Change
Children acquire a mature language system and sometimes this system differs from that of their parents. This is a significant part of language change and understanding acquisition is key to understanding this kind of change in people's internal grammars. We outline an approach to language acquisition that is based on children finding cues and microcues expressed in the input they are exposed to. This enables us to understand historical change in …
Myths and the prehistory of grammars
Only a small number of the world's languages have any kind of recorded history over more than a few generations, and in no case do records go back more than a few thousand years. From some perspectives, this doesn't matter. There are plenty of grammars to write and plenty of changes to describe accurately and then to explain in these recorded histories. Explanations for structural changes may be grounded in grammatical theory, and careful examina…
Geoffrey Sampson, Liberty and language. Oxford
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Syntactic change and the autonomy thesis
I. Despite much activity, the recent attention paid by generativists to diachronic syntax has led to no significant implications for a general theory of grammar and, from a purely historical viewpoint, has failed to focus on any well-defined concepts of historical change. The papers in this field stand largely in isolation from each other and show few common threads of interest or argumentation; there is little agreement on even the most fundamen…
Grammars for people
TWO VIEWS OF GRAMMAR For many years, many people have used the term ‘grammar’ to indicate something which represents an individual's mature linguistic capacity and which arises in the mind/brain of that individual on exposure to some relevant childhood experience. The grammar interacts with other aspects of a person's mental make-up, in a modular conception of mind. Different experiences may give rise to different grammars in different individual…
Barriers
Types of explanation in history
This article examines the ways in which explanation has been achieved in scientific work on language change over the last two hundred years. Explanations have come in many forms and at many levels and are greatly influenced by what are taken as the leading questions, which themselves have varied significantly since the early nineteenth century
Biology and language
In a recent review article in this journal, Everett (2005) finds our book Anderson & Lightfoot (2002) (as well as Givón 2002) seriously lacking and unpersuasive in the case it attempts to make for the importance of an understanding of the human language faculty as an aspect of our species' biology. Negative reviews are of course a feature of academic life, but Everett's piece exhibits enough misconceptions and misrepresentations, both of our work…
Subjacency and sex
A Piagetian Alternative
O'Grady (1983) complains that in arguing for task-specific genetic principles the transformational-generative enterprise has not given proper consideration to the alternative Piagetian view that there are no genetic principles specific to language, but that the relevant principles hold for all cognitive domains (he does not specify what the "cognitive domains" are). Although he notes judiciously that "the current research program in linguistics c…
A reply to some critics
Notes on entailment and universal quantifiers
Presuppositions dans la grammaire transformationelle
Indeterminacy in syntax
I shall illustrate here the importance of syntactic ‘blends’ for a transformational conception of syntax and, in the light of this, I shall show that if one accepts the theory of syntax outlined in Chomsky (1965), one must discard the celebrated deep structure distinction advocated there for easy and eager and the rule of Tough - Movement
Syntactic change and the autonomy thesis
I. Despite much activity, the recent attention paid by generativists to diachronic syntax has led to no significant implications for a general theory of grammar and, from a purely historical viewpoint, has failed to focus on any well-defined concepts of historical change. The papers in this field stand largely in isolation from each other and show few common threads of interest or argumentation; there is little agreement on even the most fundamen…
Mechanisms of Syntactic Change
A reply to some critics
Geoffrey Sampson, Liberty and language. Oxford
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
A Piagetian Alternative
O'Grady (1983) complains that in arguing for task-specific genetic principles the transformational-generative enterprise has not given proper consideration to the alternative Piagetian view that there are no genetic principles specific to language, but that the relevant principles hold for all cognitive domains (he does not specify what the "cognitive domains" are). Although he notes judiciously that "the current research program in linguistics c…
Grammatical theory
Predication and Pro
The comprehensive theory of predication developed by Williams (1980, 1982, 1983) subsumes a wide range of phenomena, but contains some internal problems. An alternative account is presented here which does not postulate a distinct level of Predicate Structure, but assumes that pro may be governed. This entails new analyses of small clauses and control phenomena, and leads to a revision of the conditions under which empty elements may occur
Barriers
Subjacency and sex
Government
Review article of Luigi Rizzi, Revitalized minimality. (Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 16.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Pp. x + 147
The cultural ecology of Puebloan Pebble-Mulch gardens
Grammars for people
TWO VIEWS OF GRAMMAR For many years, many people have used the term ‘grammar’ to indicate something which represents an individual's mature linguistic capacity and which arises in the mind/brain of that individual on exposure to some relevant childhood experience. The grammar interacts with other aspects of a person's mental make-up, in a modular conception of mind. Different experiences may give rise to different grammars in different individual…
The Emergence and Development of SVO Patterning in Latin and French
This book analyses-in terms of branching-the pervasive reorganization of Latin syntactic and morphological structures: in the development from Latin to French, a shift can be observed from the archaic, left-branching structures (which Latin inherited from Proto-Indo-European) to modern right-branching equivalents. Brigitte Bauer presents a detailed analysis of this development based on the theoretical discussion and definition of and head. Subseq…
Lightfoot replies
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Response to David Lightfoot's Review of The Emergence and Development of SVO Patterning in Latin and French
The Emergence ancl Development of SVO Patterning in Latin and French: Diachronic and Psycholinguistic Perspectives.Lightfoot criticizes ideas that are not in the book and also provides inaccurate analyses of its contents.In addition» he places the work in a biological frame it does not have, thus over looking the principal contribution of the work.The book analyzes a major syntactic change and accounts for it by referring to psycholinguistic evid…
Catastrophic change and learning theory
Perceiving the Fictional World of Nesmrtelnost Through Kundera’s “I”
Kundera's characters have always struggled both with images and identities they have constructed for themselves and that others have constructed for them. Since Milan Kundera's emigration to France, much of his fiction has explored such struggles through dialogical split between youthful characters who live in the fragile world of lyrical self-expression and definition, and cynical narrator, literary representative of the author, who resides in w…
The Evolutionary Emergence of Language
Language has no counterpart in the animal world. Unique to Homo sapiens, it appears inseparable from human nature. But how, when and why did it emerge? The contributors to this volume - linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and others - adopt a modern Darwinian perspective which offers a bold synthesis of the human and natural sciences. As a feature of human social intelligence, language evolution is driven by biologically anomalous l…
How long was the nineteenth century
This paper reviews the problems of the deterministic and predictive view of language change initiated by nineteenth century linguists and shows that such a view is still present in many analyses proposed by twentieth century linguists. As an alternative to such a view, the paper discusses an approach along the lines of Niyogi and Berwick (1997), which takes the explanation for long-term tendencies to be a function of the architecture of UG and th…
Myths and the prehistory of grammars
Only a small number of the world's languages have any kind of recorded history over more than a few generations, and in no case do records go back more than a few thousand years. From some perspectives, this doesn't matter. There are plenty of grammars to write and plenty of changes to describe accurately and then to explain in these recorded histories. Explanations for structural changes may be grounded in grammatical theory, and careful examina…
More myths
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Motives for Language Change
This specially commissioned volume considers the processes involved in language change and the issues of how they can be modelled and studied. The way languages change offers an insight into the nature of language itself, its internal organisation, and how it is acquired and used. Accordingly, the phenomenon of language change has been approached from a variety of perspectives by linguists of many different orientations. This book, originally pub…
Philosophy (25 works) · Linguistics (24 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (19 works) · Computer Science (18 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Artificial Intelligence (9 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies (9 works) · Sociology (9 works)