Re: why does linguistic literature tend to be opaque?


Ray,

I'm now clear I think about what's going on. I have a copy of the
Koster collection at home somewhere so I might even look it up! My
point at this stage though is really not about syntactic theory but
back to the original topic: (deliberately) bad or opaque writing. I
don't think there's anything particularly noteworthy about the writing
in the example you quote, I just think that from what you've quoted the
author straightforwardly makes a mistake about his own syntactic
theory. Of course, he might well not have _meant_ to write what he did
(one can only hope so!) but I don't think it's particularly obscure.
Maybe because it's so obviously wrong (in suggesting that a lexical
head could govern a head in one of its argument XPs) you are tempted to
try to work out "what he really meant"? I didn't notice the problem on
first reading but I think his recursive definition could still be made
to work (if it's even worthwhile making this sort of stuff work!)

Anyway, enough of my poking my nose into other people's syntactic woes
and back to work for me.

Jim

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