David Adger, “A Syntax of Substance” (MIT Press, 2013)

David Adger, “A Syntax of Substance” (MIT Press, 2013)

Nouns are the bread and butter of linguistic analysis, and it’s easy not to reflect too hard on what they actually are and how they work. In A Syntax of Substance (MIT Press, 2013), David Adger tackles this question, as well as others that are just as fundamental to the way we think about syntax. The book takes nouns to specify “substances”, and Adger defends the view that nouns, unlike verbs, never take arguments. Moreover, he marshals evidence to show that some of the constituents that have been traditionally taken to be arguments of nouns, such as the PP “of Mary” in “the picture of Mary”, are actually not that closely connected to the noun syntactically at all. But the book’s not just about nouns: it presents a radically innovative way of building and labelling phrase structure within Minimalism, denying the existence of functional heads and allowing unary branching trees. In this interview we talk about the differences between nouns and verbs, and the evidence for this difference from a variety of languages, in particular Scottish Gaelic. After outlining the theoretical machinery that David deploys in order to account for these facts, we then move on to discuss the status of hierarchies of functional categories and the implications of this new syntactic system for cross-linguistic variation, grammaticalization, and the evolution of language.

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Leah C. Stokes, "The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet" (MIT Press, 2026)

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Mhoze Chikowero, "The Military Entertainment Complex: Chimurenga Afrosonic Making of Zimbabwe" (MIT Press, 2026)

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The Military Entertainment Complex: Chimurenga Afrosonic Making of Zimbabwe (MIT Press, 2026) by Dr. Mhoze Chikowero is the story of the making of post-independence Zimbabwe from the sounds and songs ...

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Nozomi Naoi, "The Land of Happiness: How the Japanese Department Store Visualized Modern Life" (MIT Press, 2026)

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Virginia McGee Richards, "The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway" (MIT Press, 2026)

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Some of the earliest canals in colonial America, referred to as the Inner Passage, were constructed by enslaved people living in the Lowcountry of South Carolina in the early 1700s. In a paradox of ...

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Khiara Bridges, "Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans" (MIT Press, 2026)

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Fenwick McKelvey, "SimPolitics: America’s Quest to Solve Politics with Computers" (MIT Press, 2026)

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This book is available open access. For more than six decades, the public has been promised that computers will revolutionize politics, both nationally and internationally. In SimPolitics: America...

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Soraya Murray, "Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination" (MIT Press, 2026)

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