Syntactic Theory

Syntactic Theory - Government and Binding

Government and Binding (GB) is a syntactic framework within Generative Grammar developed by Noam Chomsky in 1981. Below you find four sound files of a radio recording from Radio Free Main. In this lecture, which was delivered at the University of New Hampshire in 1995, Chomsky not only describes the development of Generative Grammar from its earliest days in the 1950s over the ideas of Principles and Parameters (which were developed in the Lectures on Government and Binding) up to recent minimalist ideas. He also talks about how these developments relate to ideas that were (and still are) discussed in the philosophy of language.