On the Use of ‘Explanatory Power’ in Syntactic Research
In much of contemporary syntactic research, the term “explanatory power” is used rather liberally, often to praise a theory’s ability to “account for” a set of observations or unify descriptive generalizations. However, such usage rarely involves a formally explicit deductive system, let alone one that generates disconfirmable predictions. In the absence of these features, “explanatory…
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