Three different foundational ideas can be identified in recent syntactic theory: structure from substitution classes, structure from dependencies among heads, and structure as the result of optimizing preferences. As formulated in this review, it is easy to see that these three ideas are completely independent. Each has a different mathematical foundation, each suggests a different natural connection to meaning, and each implies something different about how language acquisition could work. Since they are all well supported by the evidence, these three ideas are found in various mixtures in the prominent syntactic traditions. From this perspective, if syntax springs fundamentally from a single basic human ability, it is an ability that exploits a coincidence of a number of very different things.

中文翻译：

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语法的三个数学基础

在最近的句法理论中，可以确定三种不同的基本思想：替换类的结构，头目之间的依存关系的结构以及优化偏好的结构。如本评论所述，很容易看出这三个想法是完全独立的。每个人都有不同的数学基础，每个人都暗示着与意义的不同自然联系，并且每个人都暗示着语言习得的工作方式有所不同。由于它们都得到了充分的证据支持，因此这三种思想在著名的句法传统中以多种混合形式出现。从这个角度来看，如果语法从一个基本的人类基本能力中产生，那么它就是一种利用许多非常不同的事物的巧合的能力。