Volume 8, Issue 2, 2008
Philosophy of Linguistics
John Collins
Pages 241-247
A Note on Conventions and Unvoiced Syntax
This note briefly responds to Devitt’s (2008) riposte to Collins’s (2008a) argument that linguistic realism prima facie fails to accommodate unvoiced elements within syntax. It is argued that such elements remain problematic. For it remains unclear how conventions might target the distribution of PRO and how they might explain hierarchical structure that is presupposed by such distribution and which is not witnessed in concrete strings.