re traces
I have a bad feeling about fuckyeahlinguistics:
Also it’s totally not cool that any failure of the UG is explained away by a “trace” placeholder in the specifier position. That’s just messed up. That’s like saying that any time the stock market fails when economics predicts it shouldn’t there were goblins that no one can see who caused it to fail. Long story short I don’t like syntax.
Traces are used in the representation of syntactic structures to show the relationship of between a displaced element and its original position. This can constrain the set of possible transformations, as a trace may block arbitrary movement by other elements into a previous occupied node. They are not “failures of the UG” because UG is a general theoretical framework for thinking about language acquisition and the mental representation of language, and traces are merely elements in specific theories of syntactic representation. Just because a specific descriptive theory of language has some kind of representational issue doesn’t mean there’s a failure in our explanatory theory of Language.
