On explaining “Explanations”

What is an explanation? The popular responses are: We can explain what a word means, how to run a computer programme, why John decided to marry Jane, and even historical facts like the extinction of the dinosaurs. But what about explananda such as the linguistic entity “Who saw John?”. The paper surveys a spectrum of responses, some theory-free, others theory-bound. For all of these, we employ the six Dimensions of explanation

Studies in the Acquisition of Greek as a Native Language: I. Some Preliminary Findings on Phonology

This paper discusses some preliminary findings from a 'pilot' study of the acquisition of phonology by normal Greek children in a monolingual environment in Athens, Greece, and draws on data elicited by the authors during the summer of 1971 from children of from 24 months to 9 years of age. The five topics treated concern (1) the problem of observational adequacy in the transcription of child language, (2) the developmental disruption of the syntactic function of suprasegmentals, (3) the 'primacy' of the labial stop, (4) child speech-production and the migration of Features, segments, and syllables, and (5) the acquisition of external sandhi and the reinterpretation of the Greek stops

Copying, and Order-changing Transformations in Modern Greek

The phenomenon of "redoublement de complement" in Modern Greek may straightforwardly be re-interpreted as copying: that is, in terms of a rule-series that copies the complement on to the front of the Verb-Phrase, pronominalizes one or other of the two occurrences, and then either treats the pronominalized occurrence as an enclitic or deletes it. But evidence may be adduced that, at least for Greek, a similar copying process is also involved in the transformations for Relativisation, Subject-raising, and Conjunct-movement, as well as in the derivation of inputs for backward Gapping. It is suggested that the difference between the English and Greek outputs results not from the fact that English employs "order-change" where Greek employs "copy" processes: rather, the processes of Copy are common, but English obligatorily deletes the relics of copy, while Greek sometimes retains them. Copying is thus to be considered an important (and universal?) mechanism of order-changing