Evaluating Formal Analysis Results on the basis of Typological Facts of the Language

Abstract

Linguistic research carried out in formal theoretical frameworks, such as Generative Approaches, often show high degree of falsifiability due to their precise data observations and mathematical foundations. Combining these qualities with the psychological reality of typological studies will result to more reliable conclusions. In this paper, I tried to show that having an eye on the typological facts of a language (Farsi in this case) might end up into a more precise and realistic conclusion of a formalist linguistic analysis. Two papers are used here as sample of formalist approaches - Generative Linguistics in general and Minimalist program particularly- one on the functional head position of sentence in Persian and the other one on topicalization in Persian.

Keywords

• functional projections
• head-position parameter
• syntactic movement
• base-generation
• topicalization
• mixed-type languages