Bob Frank heads to Italy for workshop on open questions in syntax

Ne.T.S., the Center for Neurocognition and Theoretical Syntax at the Instituto Universitario di Studi Superiori in Pavia, Italy, is hosting an illustrious group of syntacticians for a workshop this weekend. Called “Can there be a Hilbert List of Syntax (yet)?”, the workshop seeks to enumerate the major unsolved problems of the theory of syntax, analogous to Hilbert's list of problems in mathematics. Professor Bob Frank is one of the speakers; his talk will focus on two sorts of problems: (1) the role of “third factor” explanations in syntax, and how the notion of computational efficiency might be understood in a way that yields substantive predictions about the nature of grammar; and (2) the unity (or possibly lack thereof) of grammatical dependencies and their interactions with locality restrictions.