When Jay Keyser arrived at MIT in 1977 to head theDepartment of Linguistics and Philosophy, he writes, he "felt like a fishthat had been introduced to water for the first time." At MIT, acolleague grabbed him by the lapels to discuss dark matter; Noam Chomsky calledhim "boss" (double SOB spelled bac[...]
The achievements of Panini and the Indian grammarians, beginning nearly 2500 years ago, have never been fully appreciated by Western scholars--partly because of the great technical difficulties presented by such an inquiry, and partly because relevant tutorial articles have been confined to obscure [...]
This work is the culmination of an 18-year collaboration between Ken Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser on the study of the syntax of lexical items. It examines the hypothesis that the behaviour of lexical items may be explained in terms of a very small number of very simple principles.[...]