Giorgio Graffi

List of John Benjamins publications for which Giorgio Graffi plays a role.

Journals

Titles

Subjects History of linguistics | Syntax | Theoretical linguistics

Articles

The question of monogenesis vs. polygenesis of human languages was essentially neglected by contemporary linguistics until the appearance of the research on the genetics of human populations by L. L. Cavalli-Sforza and his collaborators, which brought to light very exciting parallels between the… read more
According to Chomsky’s report of the mid 1970s, he and Harris developed their theories in an essentially independent way; whereas according to some statements by Harris, some contact actually took place between them. To shed light on this issue, it may be useful to systematically compare their… read more
Graffi, Giorgio 2010 The “linguistic wars”: A tentative assessment by an outsider witnessChomskyan (R)evolutions, Kibbee, Douglas A. (ed.), pp. 395–420 | Article
In the last two decades a debate developed about the historiography of the so-called “linguistic wars” of the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the fight between “generative semantics” (GS) and “extended standard theory” (EST). This historiographical debate looks as rough as the original “wars”… read more
The use of the asterisk in descriptive and theoretical linguistics is attested well before the 1950s (contrary to what has been maintained by Householder in 1973). It is suggested that the meaning of the asterisk was extended from that of ‘unattested form’, which was standard in historical… read more
This article examines the views about syntax held by Humboldt, on the one hand, and by the founders of historical-comparative grammar (Bopp, Rask, Grimm, Pott, Schleicher), on the other. In general, it is noted that the grammaire générale tradition of 17th and 18th centuries still survives in the… read more
Graffi, Giorgio 1998 A survey of syntactic theories in the 20th centuryHistoriographia Linguistica 25:3, pp. 373–385 | Review article
Graffi, Giorgio 1988 Structural Subject and Thematic SubjectLingvisticæ Investigationes 12:2, pp. 397–414 | Article
In the tradition of generative grammar, two different definitions of "subject" have been proposed: we name the first one "structural", since it is based on the constituent structure of the sentence, and the second one "thematic", because it makes use of the concept of thematic role. We argue that… read more