Skip to content
Stata Center

MIT Linguistics: Department of Linguistics & Philosophy

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

People

David Pesetsky :: Publications

Recent papers

The Identity Thesis for Language and Music
(October 2009, with Jonah Katz)
[clickable sound included in the PDF; sound files also available here]

Against Taking Diversity at "Face Value"
Invited commentary (May 2009) on "The Myth of Language Universals" by Evans & Levinson,
a target article to appear in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

pedagogical chapter on Case theory (with Esther Torrego)
Draft of a chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism, February 2009

Pirahã Exceptionality: a Reassessment
(with Andrew Nevins and Cilene Rodrigues)
Language 85.2, 355-404 (June 2009) [An earlier draft is available here.] (Responds to this paper, among others.)

Evidence and Argumentation: a Reply to Everett (2009)
(with Andrew Nevins and Cilene Rodrigues)
Language 85.3, 671-681 (September 2009) (A reply to this response to the paper listed above.)

Property Delay: Remarks on "Phase Extension" by Marcel den Dikken
Solicited "peer commentary", Theoretical Linguistics., 33.1, pp. 105-120. (2007)
Read the paper this is commenting on here.

Probes, Goals and Syntactic Categories (with Esther Torrego, UMass/Boston; June 2006).
In Proceedings of the Seventh Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics (Y. Otsu, ed; 2006)

The Syntax of Valuation and the Interpretability of Features. (with Esther Torrego, UMass/Boston; October 2004).
In Phrasal and Clausal Architecture: Syntactic Derivation and Interpretation.
Amsterdam: Benjamins. (S. Karimi, V. Samiian and W.Wilkins, eds; 2007)

 

Handouts from some recent talks

The Recursive Syntax and Prosody of Tonal Music
(2009; with Jonah Katz)
(handout for an earlier version of the paper The Identity Thesis for Language and Music listed above)
from a talk at the conference Recursion: Structural Complexity in Language and Cognition;
includes clickable sound (OS X users: Adobe Acrobat only, sound does not work in Preview)

Music Syntax is Language Syntax (2007)
[Updated version of a handout from a talk first delivered at the conference Language and Music as Cognitive Systems]

Russian case morphology and the syntactic categories (2008)
[Invited Talk, Leipzig-Harvard Workshop on Morphology and Argument Encoding.
Earlier version given at Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL 16)]

 

Manuscript versions of recently published work

Cyclic Linearization of Syntactic Structure (with Danny Fox, MIT; May 2004)
[Theoretical Linguistics 31.1-2, 1-46. special issue on Object Shift in Scandinavian; Katalin É. Kiss, ed.]

Responses to Fox & Pesetsky (2004) from Theoretical Linguistics 31.1-2:
by Elena Anagnostopoulou; Jonathan Bobaljik; Molly Diesing; Anders Holmberg; Gereon Mueller; Øystein Nilsen;
Peter Sells
; Balázs Surányi; Peter Svenonius; and Edwin Williams. [links are to those drafts available on the web].

Reply to the responses by Fox and Pesetsky.
[Theoretical Linguistics 31.1-2, 235-262. special issue on Object Shift in Scandinavian; Katalin É. Kiss, ed.]

Note: The Theoretical Linguistics paper contains about 1/3 of the material that will form part of a monograph, in prep.
For some of the remaining material, the best current source is the following lengthy handout:
"Cyclic Linearization and the Typology of Movement"
(with Danny Fox, MIT)

Related work:
"Cyclic Linearization and Asymmetry in Scrambling" by Heejeong Ko
"Pseudo-gapping and Cyclic Linearization" by Shoichi Takahashi

"Tense, case, and the nature of syntactic categories" (with Esther Torrego, UMass/Boston; 2002)
[Final version in The Syntax of Time, J. Guéron and J. Lecarme (eds.), MIT Press 2004]

"T-to-C Movement: Causes and Consequences (with Esther Torrego, UMass/Boston)"
[Final version in Michael Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken Hale: A Life on Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (2001)]

"The Maturation of Grammatical Principles: Evidence from Russian Unaccusatives"
(with Maria Babyonyshev, Ronald Fein, Jennifer Ganger and Kenneth Wexler)
[Significantly revised version appeared in Linguistic Inquiry 32.1 (2001)]

Phrasal Movement and Its Kin
[Final version appeared as an MIT Press Monograph (2000)]

"Principles of Sentence Pronunciation"
[Final version appeared In P. Barbosa, D. Fox, P. Hagstrom, M. McGinnis and D. Pesetsky (eds.)
Is the Best Good Enough?
, MIT Press (1998)]

 

Older Unpublished work

These PDF files are made from older manuscripts, and were not prepared for publication. They contain formatting and other errors.

"Russian Morphology and Lexical Theory" (1977)
[Generals paper in phonology from my graduate student days. Of interest as the birthplace of (what later became known as) Lexical Phonology.]

"The Earliness Principle" (1989)
[Paper presented at GLOW in 1989, but never written up.
Interesting data and observations about counterfactual inversion and about short verb movement in English.]

"Zero Syntax: vol. 2: Infinitives "(1991)
[Material intended for Zero Syntax but not included in the final publication.]

 

Education-related

"How Psychological Science Informs the Teaching of Reading",
by Keith Rayner, Barbara R. Foorman, Charles A. Perfetti, David Pesetsky, and Mark S. Seidenberg.
Psychological Science in the Public Interest 2:2 (November 2001)

"How Reading Should be Taught"
by Keith Rayner, Barbara R. Foorman, Charles A. Perfetti, David Pesetsky, and Mark S. Seidenberg. Scientific American, March 2002.

"The Battle for Language: from Syntax to Phonics"
[a handout for a talk in a USC series on Language and Mind. (2000)]

"If Language Is Instinctual, How Should We Write and Teach?"
[a talk delivered to a 1997 seminar organized by the American Society of Newspaper Editors]

"Linguistics and Learning to Read"
[ an essay prepared for a 1996 workshop of the National Council of Teachers of English]

 

Books

Phrasal Movement and its Kin. MIT Press, 2000.

Is the Best Good Enough? MIT Press, 1998.

Zero Syntax, MIT Press, 1994.