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The Structure of Syntactic Typologies
Author(s) -
GRIMSHAW JANE
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
mind and language
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.905
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1468-0017
pISSN - 0268-1064
DOI - 10.1111/mila.12032
Subject(s) - variation (astronomy) , sentence , computer science , syntactic structure , optimality theory , linguistics , syntax , artificial intelligence , phonology , philosophy , physics , astrophysics
This article illustrates how language variation and the limits of variation are given a shared and principled explanation in Optimality Theory. It shows that languages can be ‘uniform’, choosing the same grammatical structures in three different sentence types. They can also be ‘non‐uniform’, but the combinations of grammatical structures that they can exhibit are extremely restricted. The theory characterizes possible and impossible grammatical systems without special stipulations or additional theoretical machinery.