On Subject-Auxiliary Inversion and the notion “purely formal generalization”

English Subject-Auxiliary Inversion (SAI, hereafter) has been considered by many linguists to be a prime example of a formal generalization that does not allow a characterization in functional or semantic terms. However, Adele Goldberg's target article argues that the internal syntactic form of SAI can indeed by characterized in such terms. We provide a considerable amount of evidence that Goldberg is unsuccessful in her attempt to mount a counter-challenge to the idea that SAI represents a significant purely formal generalization in the grammar of English. © 2009 Walter de Gruyter.