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An argument that Modernism is a cognitive phenomenon rather than a cultural one. At the beginning of the twentieth century, poetry, music, and painting all underwent a sea change. Poetry abandoned rhyme and meter; music ceased to be tonally centered; and painting no longer aimed at faithful representation. These artistic developments have been attributed to cultural factors ranging from the Industrial Revolution and the technical innovation of photography to Freudian psychoanalysis. In this book, Samuel Jay Keyser argues that the stylistic innovations of Western modernism reflect not a cultural shift but a cognitive one. Behind modernism is the same cognitive phenomenon that led to the scien...
A memoir of MIT life, from being Noam Chomsky's boss to negotiating with student protesters.
This work is the culmination of an eighteen-year collaboration between Ken Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser on the study of the syntax of lexical items. It examines the hypothesis that the behavior of lexical items may be explained in terms of a very small number of very simple principles. In particular, a lexical item is assumed to project a syntactic configuration defined over just two relations, complement and specifier, where these configurations are constrained to preclude iteration and to permit only binary branching. The work examines this hypothesis by methodically looking at a variety of constructions in English and other languages.
These seven original essays commissioned in tribute to MIT Philosophy Professor Sylvain Bromberger present some of the most exciting research being conducted today in linguistics. Each essay is informed by Bromberger's ongoing inquiry into how we "come to know that there are things in the world that we don't know." Included in the collection is the edited version of Noam Chomsky's minimalist paper.
Why we enjoy works of art, and how repetition plays a central part in the pleasure we receive. Leonard Bernstein, in his famous Norton Lectures, extolled repetition, saying that it gave poetry its musical qualities and that music theorists' refusal to take it seriously did so at their peril. Play It Again, Sam takes Bernstein seriously. In this book, Samuel Jay Keyser explores in detail the way repetition works in poetry, music, and painting. He argues, for example, that the same cognitive function underlies both how poets write rhyme in metrical verse and the way songwriters like Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn (“Satin Doll”) and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (“My Funny Valentine...
A proposal that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a “person space” at the heart of every pronominal expression. This book offers a significant reconceptualization of the person system in natural language. The authors, leading scholars in syntax and its interfaces, propose that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a “person space” at the heart of every pronominal expression. They map the journey of person features in grammar, from semantics through syntax to the system of morphological realization. Such an in-depth cross-modular study allows the development of a theory in which assumptions made about the behavior of ...
A new approach to grammar and meaning of relational nouns is presented along with its empirical consequences.
A memoir of MIT life, from being Noam Chomsky's boss to negotiating with student protesters. When Jay Keyser arrived at MIT in 1977 to head the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, he writes, he "felt like a fish that had been introduced to water for the first time." At MIT, a colleague grabbed him by the lapels to discuss dark matter; Noam Chomsky called him "boss" (double SOB spelled backward?); and engaging in conflict resolution made him feel like "a marriage counselor trying to reconcile a union between a Jehovah's witness and a vampire." In Mens et Mania, Keyser recounts his academic and administrative adventures during a career of more than thirty years. Keyser describes the admi...
The Representation of(In)definiteness collects the most important current research, reflecting a wide range of approaches, on a central theoretical issue in linguistics: characterizing the distinction between definite and indefinite expressions. The authors of these 11 original essays, which draw on current work in theoretical syntax and semantics, were charged by the editors to take more than usual heed of alternative analyses offered by other theories, thereby promoting cross fertilization of syntactic and semantic ideas, concepts, and argumentation. The project as a whole is grounded in the belief that explicit comparison of seemingly incompatible approaches is essential to improve our understanding of the nature and structure of natural language. Eric J. Reuland and Alice ter Meulen are Professors of Linguistics at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen and the University of Washington respectively. The Representation of (In)definiteness is fourteenth in the series Current Studies in Linguistics, edited by Samuel Jay Keyser.