Bare Grammar: A Study of Language Invariants

Drawing on general algebraic notions of structure and symmetry, this volume explores the invariants of generative grammars, showing how structural notions in generative grammar are provably invariant in grammars, and specific morphemes are invariant in exactly the same sense in languages that have them.

Edward Keenan and Edward Stabler’s analysis illustrates how relations such as the anaphor-antecedent relation can be invariant in all grammars, even if realized differently in different languages, and it argues that the existence of universal invariants does not assume that grammars of different languages are isomorphic. Bare Grammar ultimately concludes that the relation between form and meaning is not entirely arbitrary.