Introduction and Overview: Syntax and its interfaces

Volker Struckmeier
IDSL I, University of Cologne

The talk gives an overview of general aims and methods of syntactic theorizing. While representing word order in a language (and explaining cross-linguistic variation in this field) is often seen as the raison d’être of syntactic theory, many contemporary theories actually
• have much more ambitious aims (in that they try to represent sentence-level semantics and/or information structural properties),
• but do not aim to explain word order properties completely (which are, in part, delegated to phonological components of the grammar).

Syntactic theory thus maps interpretative properties of language onto (partially determined) form aspects. The two interfaces impose radically different requirements:
• On the form side, ordering properties as well as prosodic properties that depend on syntactic configurations must be specified (to the degree that they are determined syntacto-semantically).
• On the meaning side, syntactic structures must determine semantic as well as information structural interpretations (to the degree that these are morphosyntactically determined).

In my talk, I want to present an overview of the current state of the art in generative syntactic theories and point out some particularly vexing questions that demonstrate the intricate problems syntax faces at the moment.