Government-Binding Theory (GB) was a huge step forward—it was the first comprehensive theory of FL’s fine structure that had the wherewithal to meet the gap’s dimensions. GB offered a decent outline of the sorts of properties FL innately contains—it also offered a decent empirically justifiable outline of the linguistic specificity of these properties, meaning that GB’s principles refer to structures, operations, and primitives that are narrowly linguistic and that aren’t special cases of more domain-general structures, principles, and operations. And critically, GB was empirically well grounded thanks largely to the explosive growth of research into comparative grammar that took place from the mid-’70s to the mid-’90s.
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