Simpler Syntax
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Simpler Syntax is the title of a 2005 book by Ray Jackendoff and Peter Culicover. The authors argue that modern minimalist syntax is going in the wrong direction, adopting ever more complex structures and derivations, and making overly strong assumptions about linguistic universals (Richard Kayne's theory of Antisymmetry is one example they cite). Culicover and Jackendoff propose that the syntactic, semantic and phonological components of the language faculty are all generative; that is, there is no asymmetric dependence between any of these components. In contrast, it is traditionally assumed that syntax is the only generative component, the function of the semantic and phonological components being merely to "interpret" syntactic structures. Culicover and Jackendoff suggest that there is a flexible, constraint-based mapping between these different components which does not privilege any one over the others.
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