1161: X-Bar Assumptions Feb 12, 2018

Syntacticians sometimes have to make certain claims about how language must be logically, even if it doesn't appear that way necessarily, in order to maintain certain theories. This is not prescriptive as such, because these linguists are still describing how people actually talk, but simply have to come up with certain reasons of how things must be. For instance, "a subject must be a determiner phrase", i.e made up of at least a determiner (like 'the', 'a' or 'some') and a noun. Nevertheless, plenty of subjects do not have such elements, such as with given-names, or when there is zero-determiner, also called a silent determiner. In English, a silent determiner regularly appears when the subject is indefinite and plural, e.g. '[determiner] men are from Mars", as opposed "the men....", which changes the meaning. Why not just say that subjects (and many other things like this) don't need to have a determiner, and instead claim that they have a determiner that happens to be silent? Consider that most present tense forms of verbs are not modified at all; if a verb 'run' is put in the first person present "I/we run", this does not mean that the verb doesn't have tense in this case, but does when it becomes "he runs"; instead, both are present tense, but 'I run' has a zero tense-marker. The logic of the theory (X-bar theory it's called), is still supported by a great deal of syntactic and neurolinguistic evidence, even though certain assumptions have to be made about how humans think. 

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