How are native speakers of a language instinctively able to make precise linguistic judgements about marginal syntactic matters? What does this tell us about both the structure of language and our innate language ability as humans? These questions form the focus of this in-depth study.

He suggests that the learning mechanism does not generalize significantly beyond the evidence presented to it, and further that it seeks to form generalizations based on all and only the evidence presented to it. Syntactic Nuts makes a fundamental contribution to generative grammar and syntactic theory. It situates syntactic theory within cognitive science in a novel way. It contributes to an alternative, and yet in many ways traditional, perspective on the manner in which knowledge is represented and processed in the mind.

On the nature of linguistic explanation
Between learning and predetermination
Architecture of the learner
The theory of syntactic categories
either, etc
for
Determiners and quantifiers
Odd prepositions
the the
Uniformity
Syntactic idiosyncrasies and the learner
Reductions
Movements
Inflections
Other potential nuts
Brief mention
Generality and idiosyncrasy in grammar
Syntactic complexity
Consequences
Summary
References
Index