Mans Search for Meaning in Samuel Becketts Waiting for...

Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett; a tragic comedy in which Estragon and Vladimir wait for a person named Godot, who never shows up. This existentialist play, which takes place in a single setting, and time, follows the actions and the traditional rules of human existence, and doing nothing in their lives except waiting. Beckett has written a play in which nothing happens, and one minute is no different than the next. The play ends exactly the way it begins, with two men waiting impatiently for Godot and try to exist in the hostile and uncaring world by their human condition, e.g. they keep repeating themselves, talking nonsense, forgetting and trying to find the answer the question: Who and where is Godot? From the paradoxical†¦show more content†¦The routine occurs in front of the audience and the same chain of events: Estragon sleeps in a ditch, Vladimir meets him at the tree, they are visited by Pozzo and Lucky, and a boy comes to tell them that Godot will not be comi ng that day, but will surely be there the following day. In this way repetition dictates the structure of the play. No climax occurs in the play because the only thing the plot builds to is the coming of Godot. However, by the end of the first act the audience has begun that Godot will never show up. Not very long into the second act before the audience realizes that all Vladimir and Estragon are really doing is wasting time, â€Å"Waiting for...waiting.† (50) This tells us that do something than waiting around, because Estragon and Vladimir do nothing than wait, and they should stop waiting or either find Godot or leave because Godot might not come forever. Beckett has written an existentialism play showing that an individual must take action instead of just sitting around and waiting. In the entire play Estragon and Vladimir never refer to each other as Estragon and Vladimir, but rather Gogo and Didi their nicknames. Despite Vladimir and Estragon being two distinct characters on the stage, they constantly finish off each other’s sentences. In this sense Estragon and Vladimir are indistinguishable, and represent all of humanity, as Vladimir later says â€Å"all mankind is us† (74). In the second act,Show MoreRelatedMans Search for Meaning in Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot1155 Words   |  5 Pagesprevious theatre, which may typically contain excitement, exaggeration and liveliness. He suggests that one of the major constituents of human experience is boredom, indeed the very concept of ‘Waiting for Godot’ echoes this, and Beckett implies that much of life is spent waiting for something. The play is therefore a means of undergoing the difficult task of dramatising boredom. Routine and repetitiveness are apparent throughout the play and are key to creating the worldRead MoreAnalysis Of Samuel Beckett s Waiting For Godot Essay1607 Words   |  7 Pagesgo. We can t. Why not? We re waiting for Godot.† (Beckett 332), one of the most famous lines from Beckett’s â€Å"Waiting for Godot†. Samuel Beckett is a renowned writer of his time. Although most people still question his work, he did much in the reinvention of various genres. As most people would say, Beckett lived a creative life. He was a humorist, poet, and novelist and later turned to theater director. Many authors have written works analyzing Beckett’s work. Our articles of focus are â€Å"GogoRead MoreAnalysis Of Samuel Beckett s Waiting For Godot 1950 Words   |  8 Pagesof time and place in Samuel Beckett’s (1906–1989) Waiting for Godot (1948) and Salah Abdel Sabour’s (1931–1981) The Princess Waits (Al-Amira Tantazer) (1969). It is an attempt to compare the two play s with regard to the absurd features of time and place with reference to the aspects of the absurd theatre. The reasons for selecting these two plays in particular are: firstly, both plays share the process of waiting which is directly connected with the time and place of waiting; secondly, Abdel SabourRead MoreWaiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett Nothing Happens, Nobody Comes, Nobody Goes Analysis1325 Words   |  6 PagesWaiting For Godot By Samuel Beckett â€Å"Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.† How far do you agree? Initially written in French in 1948 as â€Å"En Attendant Godot†, Samuel Beckett’s play was first staged in 1952, in Paris. It represents one of the most important movements of the twentieth century and is an example of the so-called â€Å"Theatre of the Absurd†, which had subsequently inspired numerous plays that were based on the idea of an illogical universe. The plot of the play is fairlyRead MoreWaiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett Nothing Happens, Nobody Comes, Nobody Goes Analysis1331 Words   |  6 PagesWaiting For Godot By Samuel Beckett â€Å"Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.† How far do you agree? Initially written in French in 1948 as â€Å"En Attendant Godot†, Samuel Beckett’s play was first staged in 1952, in Paris. It represents one of the most important movements of the twentieth century and is an example of the so-called â€Å"Theatre of the Absurd†, which had subsequently inspired numerous plays that were based on the idea of an illogical universe. The plot of the playRead MoreRhetorical Analysis Of Harold Pinter s The Room 9709 Words   |  39 Pagesof violence or oppression as it not only has the power to control, abuse or terrorize the victims of power play but also has the power to distort or manipulate the truth. For Pinter, the slippery nature of language or speech always causes the real meaning to be out of one’s grasp and so speech can never be fully trusted. His concern for the distortive or slippery nature of language arises from the propaganda of the war mongers or perpetrators of violence that it is an essential act, required to be

Happy Valentines Day Quotes for Your Love

There is no such thing as a perfect occasion to say I love you. The right moment is now. If your dearest is away at work, surprise him or her with a text message on Valentines Day. Or meet your sweetie for a quick lunch with some awesome chocolate cupcakes for dessert. Send two dozen roses to the office with a beautiful note attached. These quotes can help you find just the right words to make Valentines Day special. Quotes About Love VoltaireLove is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination. John LennonAll you need is love. Erica JongAnd the trouble is if you dont risk anything, you risk even more. Charles DickensHave a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts. Charles Hanson TowneI need the star shine of your heavenly eyes, after the days great sun. Lao-TzeKindness in words creates confidence, kindness in thinking creates profoundness, kindness in giving creates love. William ShakespeareLove is a smoke made with the fume of sighs. Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind. Who ever loved that loved not at first sight? Thomas Robert DewarLove is an ocean of emotions entirely surrounded by expenses. AristotleLove is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies. Honore de BalzacLove is the poetry of the senses. Zora Neale HurstonLove makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place. Lee Iacocca My father always used to say that when you die, if youve got five real friends, then youve had a great life. Wu TiNot loving is but a long dying. Romain RollandOne makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved. Antoine de Saint-ExuperyThe arms of love encompass you with your present, your past, your future; the arms of love gather you together. True love begins when nothing is looked for in return. Eden AhbezThe greatest thing youll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. J. KrishnamurtiThe moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed. Henry MillerThe only thing we never get enough of is love, and the only thing we never give enough of is love. Victor HugoThe reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to God, this is love.George Sand There is only one happiness in life: to love and be loved. Dr. SeussYou know youre in love when you cant fall asleep because the reality is finally better than your dreams. Barbara DeAngelisYou never lose by loving. You always lose by holding back. Sarah  BernhardtYour words are my food, your breath my wine. You are everything to me.

Health Is A Healthy Weight - 970 Words

Health can be described as one of the most important things that you need in your life to able to lead a happy life even more so than money. You could be poor, but still be happy because you have your health, but what exactly is health? Most people would say that health is about being a healthy weight, not having a disease but , health is something much more deeper than those simple definitions. Health is about homeostasis, specifically in three important areas. To have good health, you have to be balanced in physical, mentally and social well-being. Am I healthy? I sometimes ask myself this question as I look into my deep consciousness and open the doors to the memories of me being the fat kid and sometimes get picked on because of my weight. I would say my health is average at best right now. After graduating high school I am trying to improve my health. I recently started doing this diet called interment fasting. Interment fasting is where you have an eight hour time period whe re you are allowed to eat what ever you want to eat but you have to keep it a reasonable quantity no eating mammoth size portions every meal. The rest of the sixteen hours you are supposed to fast not eating any solid food only water during that time period. When I first started doing interment fasting it felt like my stomach was turning into a mini black hole. The sensation that I felt was like somebody was tying my stomach into a huge knot and stabbing it at the same time. When I did eat,Show MoreRelatedHealthy Versus Dangerous Way Of Losing Weight1506 Words   |  7 PagesHealthy versus Dangerous Way of Losing Weight Out of all the different ways that you can lose weight in today’s times can be dangerous, however there are still ways that you can lose weight with still being healthy. In the ways that you can lose weight being in the health or dangerous way, they both have long-term and short-term effects, health effects, and can both use different dieting techniques. The long-term and short-term effects of both would such things including the effectiveness of themRead MoreMary Maxfield Food For Thought Summary904 Words   |  4 PagesHealthy, unhealthy, good food, bad food, fat, skinny, diet, weight: all these words have been used to define what society views as the key to a balanced or unbalanced life. In the essay, Food for Thought: Resisting the Moralization of Eating, Mary Maxfield takes a look into the stigma of eating habits, health, and dieting in western society. Maxfield supports her claims by analyzing and refuting Michael Pollan’s essay, Escape from the Western Diet. Al though it is common knowledge that many peopleRead MoreDieting And Weight Management : Nutrition970 Words   |  4 Pages Healthy weight management is about your health, not your waistline, with discipline, being the difference between dieting and managing your weight. Change your mindset and you can change your body, discipline can be the difference between dieting and weight management. Health behaviors have a great effect on how we live our lives, often dictating how we experience our environment. One health behavior that many find difficult, including myself, to manage or alter over time is weight. The physicalRead MorePurpose. The Purpose Of The Study Is To Have An Understanding1289 Words   |  6 Pagesimmigrant youth in the Unites States are at a greater risk for weight management problems than non-Hispanic White Youth. It also provides an insight on how assessment of participation and weight management strategies promote greater engagement in healthy weight management and guide program development in wellness and health promotion for immigrants and refugees. Some research questions that protrude in this study are whether limiting access to healthy food choices and few opportunities for exercise affect’sRead MoreObesity Is A Complex Process953 Words   |  4 Pagessociety, local authorities, and public health service and partner organisation (PHE 2016f). In response to obesity as a public health issue, the government introduces no of policies, strategy and health campaign to tackle this problem, including Change4life campaign and Healthy Lives, Healthy People: A call to action on obesity in England (Foresight 2007). Chang4life is a public health campaign in England, which started in 2009 supported by the Department of Health to tackle growing problem of obesityRead MoreHealth Behavior And Health Education Essay1677 Words   |  7 Pages Health Behavior and Health Education Analysis Paper Increasing the Proportion of Adults at a Healthy Weight Kavya Pidaparthi University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Increasing the Proportion of Adults at a Healthy Weight As the world is changing dramatically in terms of the technology that was available a couple of decades ago, so are the health challenges and threats that we are facing. In the 1980s, the major public health problems were related to the wide spread presence of infectiousRead MoreHealthy Vs. Dangerous Weight Loss Methods870 Words   |  4 PagesHealthy vs. Dangerous Weight Loss Methods Millions of individuals struggle with their weight and continue to search for swift solutions. Weight loss programs stand as a major money maker in America, and yet, a bulk of the population still battle with obesity. Sadly, weight loss is difficult to achieve and countless people would rather not put in the hard work and dedication it requires. An abundance of individuals also desire effortless and effective ways to drop the extra pounds whether their techniquesRead MoreThe Problem Of The Global Obesity Epidemic Essay928 Words   |  4 PagesThe concept of weight is at the forefront of the majority of society’s mind when approached with the abstract idea of what it means to be â€Å"healthy†. It is often viewed as an indicator to determine which people are of good health, and which are not. With obesity rates increasing over the past decade, much fascination surrounds the topic due to the fact that it is believed to be one of the few aspects of health that society m ay control themselves. While people may not be able to completely controlRead MoreObesity And The Influences Of Physiological And Socio Economic Factors On Individual s Health And Society1340 Words   |  6 Pagesphysiological and socio-economic factors on individual’s health and society. Also, a current health strategy, ‘Healthy Weight, Healthy Lives’ proposing to prevent obesity and improve quality of individuals and society will be evaluated. Finally, the role of child, learning disability and mental health nurse in improving individual’s life will be explored. Obesity is when a person has accumulated excess amount of fat to the point that it is affecting their health (WHO, 2015). WHO (2015) defines an adult withRead MoreThe Examination of the Importance of Healthy Eating and Physical Activities in Raleigh, NC Schools844 Words   |  3 Pagesof Obesity Obesity has become a major public health issue. Healthy eating and daily physical activity play a significant role in preventing chronic diseases, such as a stroke, heart disease and cancer. These are the three leading causes of death among people under 18. The chronic disease risk factors are related to obesity. Obesity is defined as a medical condition in which excess body fat has accrued to an extent that may be a negative effect on health. Obesity in childhood cannot be classified under

Compound Words free essay sample

Preface Rut it comes time to stop and admire the view before pushing on With this remark, intended mainly as a rhetorical flourish, I cnded Semantic Structures, my 1990 book on conceptual structure and its relati on to syntax. The present study is in large part a consequence of laking my own advice: when I stepped back to admire the view, I sensed that not all was well across the broader landscape. This book is therefore an attempt to piece together various fragments of linguistic theory into a lIlore cohesive whole, and to identify and reexamine a number of standard assum ptions of linguistic theory that have contributed to the lack of fit. The architecture developed here already appeared in its essentials in my II}R7 book Consciousness and the Computational Mind, where I situated IIIL language capacity in a more general theory of mental representations, l ·onnccted this view with processing, and stated the version of the modu ­ larity hypo thesis here called Representational Modularity. At that time I assumed that the architecture could be connected with just about any theory of syntax, and left it at that. However, two particular issues led to the real i zati on that my assumption was too optimistic. The (irst concerns the nature of lex ical insertion. In 1991, Joe Emonds published a critique of my theory of conceptual structure, in which it I\elllcd to me that much of the disagreement turned on differing presup ­ po s i ti ons about how lexical items enter in to syntactic structure. Around tin same time the very same presup pos itions surfaced as crucial in a IIl1ll1hlr of inte n se discussions with Daniel Biiring and Katharina Hart11101 nil. C on se q u e n tl y in r e ply in g to Emonds, I found it necessary to un ­ earth these presuppositions and decide what I t h o ught lexical insertion is rtally like. A fortuitous i n vi ta tion to the 2nd Tilburg Idioms C on feren ce alive IIIl the opportun ity to e x pan d these ideas and w ork out their im ­ . ,11I:al ions for idioms, loincidentally bringing me back to questi ons of again. , . xiv Preface lexical content that I had thought about in connection with my 1 975 paper on lexical redundancy rules, Morphological and Semantic Regu ­ larities in the Lexicon. The second major impetus behind this book was the appearance of Chomskys Minimalist Program, whose goal is to determine how much of the structure of language can be deduced from the need for language to obey boundary conditions on meaning and pronunciation. I found myself agreeing entirely with Chomskys goals, but differing radically in what I considered an appropriate exploration and realization. Bringing these concerns together with those of lexical insertion led to a 1 994 paper en ­ titled Lexical Insertion in a Post-Minimalist Theory of Grammar. This paper was circulated widely, and I received (what was for me at least) a flood of comments, mostly enthusiastic, from linguists and cognitive scientists of all stripes. As a consequence, the paper grew beyond a size appropriate for a journal, hence the present monograph. Many of the ideas in this study have been floating around in various subcommunities of linguistics, sometimes without contact with each other. The idea that a grammar uses unification rather than substitution as its major operation, which I have adopted here, now appears in practically every approach to generative grammar outside Chomskys immediate circle; similarly, most non-Chomskian generative approaches have aban ­ doned transformational derivations (an issue about which I am agnostic here). The idea adopted here of multiple, coconstraining grammatical structures appeared first in autosegmental phonology of the mid- 1 970s and continues into the syntax-phonology relation and the syntax-semantics relation in a wide range of approaches. What is original here, I think, is not so much the technical devices as the attempt to take a larger perspective than usual on grammatical struc ­ ture and to fit all of these innovations together, picking and choosing variations that best suit the whole. In fact, for reasons of length and readability, I have not gone into a lot of technical detail. Rather, my in ­ tent is to establish reasonable boundary conditions on the architecture and to work out enough consequences to see the fruitfulness of the approach. My hope is to encourage those who know much more than I about millions of different details to explore the possibilities of this architecture for their own concerns. Acknowledgments xpress my gratitude to those people who offered comments materials from which the present work developed, including Steve Anderson, Mark Aronoff, Hans den Besten, Manfred Bierwisch, Daniel Buring, Patrick Cavanagh, Marcelo Dascal, Martin Everaert, Yehuda J;alk, Bob Freidin, Adele Goldberg, Georgia Green, Jane Grimshaw, Ken Ilale, Morris Halle, Henrietta Hung, Paul Kay, Paul Kiparsky, Ron I a n gac ker, Joan Maling, Alec Marantz, Fritz Newmeyer, Urpo Nikanne, Curios Otero, Janet Randall, Jerry Sadock, Ivan Sag, Andre Schenk, Lindsay Whaley, Edwin Williams, Edgar Zurif, and various anonymous referees. A seminar at Brandeis University in the fall of 1 994 was of great help in solidifying the overall point of view and developing the material. Iklh J ack en do ffs energy and enthusiasm in collecting the Wheel of liJrlune corpus was an important spur to the development of chapter 7. Katharina Hartmann r ead an early draft of most of the book and sug ­ gl:stcd some important structural changes. Comments on the penultimate draft from Robert Beard, Paul Bloom, Daniel Biiring, Peter Culicover, I gt;an Dcnnett, Pim Levelt, lda Toivonen, a nd Moira Yip were instru ­ nwntal in tuning it up into its present form. Anne Marks editing, as ever, ? Illoothed out much stylistic lumpiness and lent the text a touch of class. My first hook. Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar, ac ­ knowledged my debt to a numher of individuals in reaction to whose xvi Acknowledgments work my own had developed. I am pleased to be able to thank again two of the central figures of that long-ago Generative Semantics tradition, Jim McCawley and Paul Postal, for their many insightful comments on aspects of the work presented here. It is nice to know that collegiality can be cultivated despite major theoretical disagreement. I also want to thank three people with whom I have been collaborating over the past few years, on projects that play important roles in the pres ­ ent study. Work with Barbara Landau has deeply influenced my views on the relationship between language and spatial cognition, and conse ­ quently my views on interfaces and Representational Modularity (chapter 2). Peter Culicover and I have been working together on arguments that binding is a relationship stated over conceptual structure, not syntax; I draw freely on this work in chapter 3. James Pustejovskys work on the Generative Lexicon, as well as unpublished work we have done together, is a major component in the discussion of semantic composition (chapter 3) and lexical redundancy (chapter 5). It is a pleasure to acknowledge financial as well as intellectual support. I am grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for a fellowship in 1 993- 1 994 during which several parts of this study were conceived, though not yet molded into a book; this research has also been supported in part by National Science Foundation grant IRI 92- 1 3849 to Brandeis University. Finally, as usual, Amy and Beth are the foundation of my existence. Much research in linguistics during the past three decades has taken place in the context of goals, assumptions, and methodological biases laid down in the 1 960s. Over time, certain of these have been changed within various traditions of research, but to my knowledge there has been little thorough examination of the context of the entire theory. The problem of keeping the larger context in mind has been exacerbated by the explosion of research, which, although it is a testament to the flourishing state of the field, makes it difficult for those in one branch or technological frame ­ work to relate to work in another. The present study is an attempt to renovate the foundations of linguis ­ tic theory. This first chapter articulates some of the options available for pursuing linguistic investigation and integrating it with the other cognitive sciences. In particular, I advocate that the theory be formulated in such a way as to promote the possibilities for integration. Chapter 2 lays out the basic architecture and how it relates to the architecture of the mind more ge n e rally. The remaining chapters work out some consequences of these b oundary conditions for linguistic theory, often rather sketchily, but in en ough detail to see which options for further elaboration are promising and which are not. One of my methodol ogical goals in the present study is to keep the arguments as framework-free as possible-to see what conditions make the most sense no matter what machinery one chooses for writing gram ­ mars. My hope is that such an app r oach will put us in a better position to evalu ate the degree to which di ffe re nt frameworks reflect similar concerns, and to scc what is essential and what is accidental in each frameworks way of going about formulating linguistic insights. 2 Chapter 1 1. 1 Universal Grammar The arguments for Universal Grammar have by now become almost a mantra, a sort of preliminary ritual to be performed before plunging into the technical detail at hand. Yet these arguments are the reason for the existence of generative grammar, and therefore the reason why most of todays linguists are in the profession rather than in computer science, literature, or car repair. They are also the reason why linguistics belongs in the cognitive sciences, and more generally why linguistics concerns people who have no interest in the arcana of syllable weight or excep ­ tional case marking. These arguments are due, of course, to Chomskys work of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Far more than anyone else, Chomsky is responsi ­ ble for articulating an overall vision of linguistic inquiry and its place in larger intellectual traditions. By taking Universal Grammar as my start ­ ing point, I intend to reaffirm that, whatever differences surface as we go on, the work presented here is down to its deepest core a part of the Chomskian tradition. 1. 1. 1 The Mentalist Stance The basic stance of generative linguistics is that we are studying the nature of language, not as some sort of abstract phenomenon or social artifact, but as the way a human being understands and uses language. In other words, we are interested ultimately in the manner in which language ability is embodied in the human brain. Chomsky makes this distinction nowadays by saying we are studying internalized language (I-language) rather than externalized language (E-language). Generative grammar is not the only theory of language adopting this stance. The tradition of Cognitive Grammar adopts it as well, Lakoff (1990), for instance, calling it the cognitive commitment. On the other hand, a great deal of work in formal semantics does not stem from this assumption. For instance, Bach (1989) asserts Chomskys major insight to be that language is a formal system-disregarding what I take to be the still more basic insight that language is a psychological phenomenon; and Lewis (1972), following Frege, explicitly disavows psychological concerns. and social aspects of language? One can maintain a mentalist stance without simply dismissing them, as Chomsky sometimes seems to. It might be, for instance, that there are purely ab ­ stract prope rties that any system must have in order to serve the expres- What about the abstract Questions, Goals, Assumptions sive purposes that language serves; and there might 3 be properties that language has because of the social context in which it is embedded. The mentalist stance would say, though, that we eventually need to investigate how such properties are spelled out in the brains of language users, so that people can use language. It then becomes a matter of where you want to place your bets methodologically: life is short, you have to decide what to spend your time studying. The bet made by generative linguistics is that here are some important properties of human language that can be effectively studied without taking account of social factors. Similar remarks pertain to those aspects of language that go beyond the scale of the single sentence to discourse and narrative. Generative gram ­ mar for the most part has ignored such aspects of language, venturing into them only to the extent that they are useful tools for examining intrasentential phenomena such as anaphora, topic, and focus. Again, I am sure that the construction of discourse and narrative involves a cog ­ nitive competence that must interact to some degree with the competence for constructing and comprehending individual sentences. My assump ­ tion, perhaps unwarranted, is that the two competences can be treated as relatively independent. Chomsky consistently speaks of I-language as the speakers or knowledge linguistic competence, defending this terminology against various alternatives. I would rather not make a fuss over the terminology; ordi ­ nary language basically doesnt provide us with terms sufficiently differ ­ entiated for theoretical purposes. Where choice of terminology makes a difference, Ill try to be explicit; otherwise, Ill use Chomskys terms for convenience. The Notion of Mental Grammar The phenomenon that motivated Chomskys Syntactic Structures was the nlimited possibility of expression in human language, what Chomsky now calls the discrete infinity of language. In order for speakers of a language to create and understand sentences they have never heard be ­ fore, there must be a way to combine some finite number of memorized units-the words or morphemes of the language-into phrases and sen ­ tences of arbitrary length. The only way this is possible is for the speakers knowledge of the language to include a set of principles of combina ­ tion that determine which combinations are well formed and what they mean. Such principles are a conceptually necessary part of a theory of language. 4 Chapter 1 The finite set of memorized units is traditionally called the lexicon. The set of principles of combination has been traditionally called the grammar (or better, mental grammar) of the language; in recent work Chomsky has called this set the computational system. Alternatively, the term grammar has been applied more broadly to the entire I-language, including both lexicon and computational system. Given that many lexical items have internal morphological structure of interest, and that morphology has traditionally been called part of grammar, I will tend to use the term mental grammar in this broader sense. How the lexicon and its grammat ­ ical principles are related to the extralexical (or phrasal) grammatical principles will be one of the topics of the present study. Now we come to Bachs point. The major technical innovation of early generative grammar was to state the combinatorial properties of lan ­ guage in terms of a formal system. This confers many advantages. At the deepest level, formalization permits one to use mathematical techniques to study the consequences of ones hypotheses, for example the expressive power (strong or weak generative capacity) of alternative hypothesized combinatorial systems (e. g. Chomsky 1957; Chomsky and Miller 1963) or the leamability of such systems (e. g. Wexler and Culicover 1980 ). At a more methodological level, formalization permits one to be more ab ­ stract, rigorous, and compact in stating and examining ones claims and assumptions. And, as Chomsky stressed in a much-quoted passage from the preface to Syntactic Structures, a formalization uncovers conse ­ quences, good or bad, that one might not otherwise have noticed. But formalization is not an unmitigated blessing. In my experience, an excessive preoccupation with formal technology can overwhelm the search for genuine insight into language; and a theorys choice of formalism can set up sociological barriers to communication with re ­ searchers in other frameworks. For these reasons, I personally find the proper formalization of a theory a delicate balance between rigor and lucidity: enough to spell out carefully what the theory claims, but not too much to become forbidding.