Nanosyntax : A short primer to a new approach to language

Nanosyntax is a novel approach to the architecture of language, designed to make (better) sense of the new empirical picture emerging from recent years of syntactic research. It is a large-scale project, addressing a wide array of issues, ranging from big issues such as the modularity of language, to fine details, such as the derivation of allomorphy in irregular patterns of given languages and its interaction with syntactic structures. 1. The atoms of language are smaller than we thought The premise leading to the nanosyntactic project is very simple: Syntactic research has produced beautiful empirical generalisations over the last 30 years, and these generalisations have led to a profound change in the kind of mental representations (“syntactic structures”) attributed to speakers. This profound shift has however remained within the empirical and notational domain, disconnected from syntactic theory itself: the theory used on the new structures is largely similar to the theory used 20 years ago (despite terminological changes). That theory is however not a good fit with the new results – the starting question was thus simple: what is the new empirical picture telling us? What do we learn from those beautiful generalisations? A posteriori, the answer is surprisingly simple though with deep consequences: the new syntactic structures are much larger, and growing by the day, and as a result, their ingredients (their terminal nodes) are getting much smaller. This turns out to contradict a fundamental tenet of the field: the deeply ingrained assumption that the ingredients of syntactic structure (the terminal nodes) are lexical items, “words” or “morphemes”. The contradiction stems from the fact that orthodoxy views syntax as a way of arranging lexical items. But as syntactic structures grew, not only did their terminals become “much smaller”, they became submorphemic smaller than individual morphemes. As a consequence, the terminals cannot be lexical items (morphemes or words), and hence syntax cannot be a device to arrange lexical items into structures. The field is thus in a position in which its fundamental assumptions are at odds with the results of its best research. We therefore need to reconsider the orthodoxy, questioning the very premise that syntax operates on lexical items. Nanosyntax is the result of doing that. c © 2009 Michal Starke. Nordlyd 36.1, special issue on Nanosyntax, ed. Peter Svenonius, Gillian Ramchand, Michal Starke, and Knut Tarald Taraldsen, pp. 1– 6. CASTL, Tromso. http://www.ub.uit.no/baser/nordlyd/