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December 1999
6 x 9, 233 pp.
$24.00/£17.95 (PAPER)
Short

ISBN-10:
0-262-56121-2
ISBN-13:
978-0-262-56121-1

Other Editions
Cloth (1999)
Series
Linguistic Inquiry Monographs
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Economy and Semantic Interpretation
Danny Fox

In Economy and Semantic Interpretation, Danny Fox investigates the relevance of principles of optimization (economy) to the interface between syntax and semantics. Supporting the view that grammar is restricted by economy considerations, Fox argues for various economy conditions that constrain the application of "covert" operations. Among other things, he argues that syntactic operations that do not affect phonology cannot apply unless they affect the semantic interpretation of a sentence. This position has a number of consequences for the architecture of grammar. For example, it suggests that the modularity assumption, according to which a language's syntax must be characterized independently of its semantics, needs to be revised. Another consequence concerns new answers to the question of exactly where in the syntactic derivation the various constraints on interpretation apply.

Linguistic Inquiry Monograph No. 35

Copublished with the MIT Working Papers in Linguistics series.


Endorsements

"This finely-crafted inquiry is a major contribution to linguistic theory and to the study of syntax-semantics interconnections in particular. Fox develops a simple and far-reaching general principle of economy, and applies it to intricate data, much of it new, with careful and compelling argument. It is a truly outstanding achievement, which is sure to be highly influential, and deservedly so."
Noam Chomsky, MIT





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