Status Updates From Syntactic Structures (Janua...

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

I did my best to work out the examples in §7 on paper. I lost him when he started explaining how the transformational rules proposed throughout the section would cover the exceptions of “to be” and “to have” as main verbs; I figure it’s more likely that my own math was wrong, so I kinda nodded and moved along. I do see how a grammatical model along such lines is elegant and easily expressed

§5, on the limitations of phrase structure analysis, made sense; I can see how it becomes unmanageable to describe the full set of grammatical constructions solely through a set of simple production rules. As for §6, I got pretty lost when he explained how a less ambitious theory of linguistic structure can resolve outstanding controversies about linguistic levels and the relationships between them.