현대 생성통사론 연구의 전망과 방향

Prospects of Modern Generative Syntactic Study

This paper is purposed to investigate what modern syntax is doing and to prospect which direction it is headed for. As a pursuit of minimalism, generative syntax has been one of the most heated field of syntactic studies at least for the past 60 years and is expected to be so in the coming future. Basic tenets remain intact though, its modeling has been consistently adapted to meet the changing foci of interest. This paper critically reviews the previous models of generative syntax including GB(Government and Binding Theory) and MP(Minimalist Program), and discusses what the 21st century syntax is doing on what philosophical background. In doing so, this paper discusses long-standing philosophical problems like Plato's problem, Orwell's problem, and the so-called Darwin's problem. By questioning how human being has succeeded in evolving such a great language faculty which other creatures lack in a remarkably short period of human evolution, this paper introduces a solution to Darwin's problem in terms of the discussion of Boeckx et al. (2009) that the necessary minimum for the build-up of language faculty is its labeling property. Label operation is claimed to be responsible for explaining the recursion property of human languages. This paper also predicts that syntactic study will be one of the most promising consilient field of modern cognitive science by exploring the third factor phenomena.