| Description |
This talk is about some previously unnoticed (and, we suspect, significant) properties of the celebrated X-bar schema (Chomsky 1970; Jackendoff 1977). We observe that the X-bar schema is a uniquely special recursive format; this Golden Phrase is “just right” with respect to certain fundamental mathematical properties, of the kind that crop up repeatedly in the study of physical systems. We focus on three properties that seem likely to be of significance, noting that the X-bar form is the only kind of structure with all three properties.
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