Problems in Syntax PDF
Preview Problems in Syntax
PROBLEMS IN SYNTAX STUDIES IN LANGUAGE Editorial Board : Noam Chomsky - Femand Vandamme Liliane Tasmowski - Dominique Willems Technical editor: Etienne De Vlieger STUDIES IN LANGUAGE 2 PROBLEMS IN SYNTAX W. Abraham, Cl. Blanche-Benveniste, A. Colen, B. Comrie, M. Dascal R. Declerck, S. Dik, M. Dominicy, G. Fauconnier, J. Koster, S. Kuno J. McCawley, L. Melis, C. S. Smith, W. van Langendonck, A. Zaenen Edited by Liliane TA SMOWSKI Dominique WILLEMS PLENUM PRESS • NEW YORK AND LONDON COMMUNICA TION AND COGNITION • GHENT Distributed in the U.S.A. and Japan by Plenum Press, a Division of Plenum Publishing Corporation, 233 Spring Street, New York 10013 ISBN-13: 978-1-4612-9691-1 e-ISBN-13: 978-1-4613-2727-1 DOl: 10.1007/978-1-4613-2727-1 @ 1983. Communication and Cognition, Blandijnberg 2, B-9000 Ghent. English edition first published in 1983 simultaneously by a) Communication and Cognition, Ghent b) Plenum Publishing Corporation. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1983 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or trans- mitted, in any form or by any means, electrionic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher. CONTENTS Presentation ix The definition of[ unctions and categories Bernard COMRIE, Syntactic-morphological discrepancies in Maltese sentence structure 3 Werner ABRAHAM, Heuristic problems concerning the identification of grammatical relations: the case of the Westgermania (Dutch - English -. German) 29 Claire BLANCHE-BENVENISTE, Verb complements and sentence complements: two different types of relation 55 Alexandra COLEN, Observations on the syntax of English nominals 85 Constructional properties of the sentence Renaat DECLERCK, The structure of infinitival perception verb complements in a transformational grammar 105 Willy VA N LANGENDONCK, Passive in a semantic dependency network 129 Annie ZAENEN, Verb-first clauses in Icelandic, successive cyclic . wh-movement and syntactic binding lSI Ludo MELIS, The construction of the infinitive with causative move- ment verbs in French 181 Gilles FAUCONNIER, Generalized union 195 vii viii CONTENTS Simon DIK, On the status of verbal reflexives 231 Susumu KUNO, Reflexivization in English 257 Tense and aspect . Carlota SMITH, The temporal reference of the English futurate 273 Marcelo DASCAL, Prolegomena to a semantic analysis of phase- indicating verbal periphrases in Portuguese 289 Marc DOMINICY, Time, tense and restriction (On the French peri- phrasis 'venir de + infinitive') 325 The organization of grammar Jan KOSTER, The configurational matrix 347 James McCAWLEY, TOwards plausibility in theories of language acquisition 361 References 377 PRESENT An ON 1. After a long period of paradigmatic stability, research in syntax has been thoroughly questioned and a considerable number of alternative proposals have been put forward. Until approximately fifteen years ago, transformational generative grammar was so preponderant that one may argue without too much exaggeration that studies in the field were divided into transformational and non-transformational ones. At present, there are no indications that any of these tendencies will become predominant. In short, it is seen that alternative proposals challenge the place of syntax within the total grammar, the levels of representation, the nature of the operating rules, the kind of entities they operate upon and the degree of abstractness and formalization to be achieved. The question arises whether current practice in the field allows recognition of some common research strategy despite the tremendous variety of models proposed. In this perspective, a few outstanding scholars have agreed to offer here their solutions to problems relevant for syntax. Admittedly, the points of view could have been multiplied. In connection with the question put forward, however, we believe that nothing really distinct would have resulted. II. The themes developed by the contributors to this volume can be divided into three main areas : 1. articles dealing with problems of definition or recognition of functions and categories. 2. articles dealing with constructional properties of the sentence 3. articles dealing with tense and aspect. Two further articles are exclusively concerned with the general question of the organization of grammar. 1. What characterizes the first group of articles, concerned with the definition and delimitation of certain complement-classes or functions, is the variety in the range of the proposed arguments and the differences in hierarchy between them. In the relation between syntactic and morphological arguments, for instance, Werner Abraham and Bernard Comrie defend opposite points of view. ix x L. TASMOWSKI - D. WILLEMS BERNARD COMRIE, relying on the structural pattern of certain Maltese sentences in order to determine the subject, defends a point of view that is pure- ly syntax internal. Despite morphological evidence, constructions as g'tland-i ktieb, "at-me (a) book", are to be analyzed as "have I (a) book", if one is to do justice to the general behaviour of subject, negation and topicalization. Comrie thereby caBs attention to the fact that in the course of history, syntax has more than once induced changes in morphology. WERNER ABRAHAM, on the other hand, considering Dutch sentence patterns such as the ones illustrated by Marie gat een boek aan Jan, "Mary gave a book to John", and Marie gat Jan een boek, "Mary gave John a book", states that neither position nor presence/absence of a preposition is a reliable criterion for identifying direct and indirect objects, and neither is the passive. The suggestion is rather that in such cases one should look at cognate morpho- logically richer languages, where grammatical functions are overtly marked, and generalize cross-linguistically. The variety of argumentation, including also intonational patterns, is a striking characteristic of the contribution by CLAIRE BLANCHE-BENVE- NISTE. Concerned with the precise delimitation of French verb-complements as opposed to sentence-complements, the author shows that actual - as opposed to Old French - morphology and syntax do not permit reliable predictions in this connection, and that the V -dependents are to be recognized by a bundle of characteristics such as intonational patterns, mobility and inclusion in the scope of modality markers. The enlargement of the range of arguments, taking into account not only syntactical, but also semantic and pragmatic features is also characteristic of ALEXANDRA COLEN's analysis of English nominals. She argues for an analysis of independent sentences as a conglomerate of dependency, modal and thematic features. This analysis permits one to state the differences between that-clauses, infinitivals together with gerunds, NP's with a deverbal head and NP's with a simple N-head, in terms of exactly those features. 2. The next group of contributions, concerned with constructional proper- ties, clearly illustrates how, starting from the failure of transformational grammar to account for constructional characteristics, as pointed out by Declerck, Van Langendonck and Zaenen, a variety of new solutions and frame- works emerge: relational grammar (see Fauconnier), dependency grammar (see Van Langendonck), functional grammar (see Dik), lexical functional grammar (see Zaenen) and functional sentence perspective (see Kuno). PRESENT An ON xi Despite the divergences, e.g. concerning the basic entities that are posited, common properties emerge. Most of the proposed frameworks show little interest in formalizing, do away with the notion transformation and are concerned with a more surface oriented syntax - relational grammar being an absolute exception. The tendency to be as general as possible and to integrate a variety of facts within the same analysis is striking. Finally, the importance given to lexical, semantic and pragmatic considerations in the argumentation is to be underlined. As for the research strategies used and the relation between theory and facts, the contributions could be grouped into two main tendencies: those which, starting from the facts, classical or new ones, tend. to evaluate the existing theories and/or look for an adequate description which would account for the facts (Declerck, Van Langendonck, Zaenen, Melis, Kuno) and those which, starting from a general rule', look for adequacy throughout a variety of data (Fauconnier, Dik). RENAAT DECLERCK examines the various attempts made by trans- formational grammars to establish a deep structure that could account for the properties of English verbs of perception. He demonstrates the practical failure of every such attempt, the most adequate seeming to be Postal's Raising analysis. WILLY V AN LANGENDONCK also starts from the impossibility of a trans- formational account for passive sentences in Dutch. He opts for dependency grammar, which allows him to account for the variety of constructions available in Dutch to mask the agent. ANNIE ZAENEN, adducing material from Icelandic, shows how V/I is triggered by a "topicalized" context. As Chomskyan scholars make stylistic inversion dependent on WH-movement, they offer no general solution here. The facts are, on the contrary, naturally fitted by lexical-functional grammar as developed by Kaplan and Bresnan. Without situating himself in a particular framework, LUDO MELIS analyses sentences involving French transitive causatives of movement. He proposes two different syntactic patterns for J'envoie Marie promener, "I-send-Mary- walk", and J'envoie promener Marie, "I-send-walk-Mary". Treating as complementary the figurative and the concrete use of the first pattern, he posits a structure with a prepositional complement of locality for it. GILLES F AUCONNIER treats together a whole range of facts formerly considered to be quite distinct: French factitives, passives, predicative constructions and tense. They are analysed as different manifestations of a single principle, Union, the amalgamation of two predicates into one, which provokes xii L. TASMOWSKI - D. WILLEMS the inheritance of the complements of the second predicate by the complex new one. SIMON DIK, on the other hand, studies the manifestations of the decrease in the number of V-complements in a variety of languages. If a predicate has originally two arguments, an Agent and a Goal, one or the other can be deleted. The reflexive form of the pronoun must be considered the mark of such a deletion, for it is found where either Agent or Goal is absent, but lexically reconstructible, with a subsequent typical range of interpretations. With the contribution of SUSUMU KUNO on reflexivization in English, the limits of a purely syntactic approach and the boundaries between syntax and semantics are analysed. He proposes a two-level analysis: firstly, the syntax rule of reflexivization applies blindly to all coreferential clause mate NP's, and secondly, the distinction between surface reflexive and non-reflexive pronouns is taken care of by a low-level spelling rule of a semantic nature. This rule will account for the large range of semantic constraints. 3. The importance of semantic and pragmatic factors in syntactic research is more obvious in the next topics, concerned with tense and aspect. In fact, it could be stated that in these contributions, syntax is mainly used on the argumentation level as an argument amongst others for an essentially semantic analysis. CARLOT A SMITH argues that the English futurate progressive be analyzed as a construction that associates a present situation with a prediction about a future situation. The difference between simple and progressive futurates, on this account, is not truth conditional. Rather, the choice of aspect represents the speaker's choice to look at the present situation from different points of view. MARCELO DASCAL is concerned with the semantic representation of the Portuguese phase-indicating devices and concentrates more specifically on come~ar a + INF on the one hand, and come~ar por + INF/come~ar + GERUND on the other. The semantic formulae make use of the facts that come~ar itself seems perfective and that the periphrasis includes the suggestion of some further extension of the initiated situation. MARC DOMINICY studies the French construction venir de + INF, which is translated by a restrictive adverb in some Romance languages, in Latin and in Germanic languages. He proposes truth conditions, supplemented with pragmatic principles for the proposition exhibiting such a restrictive adverb bearing on a scalar element. For some of these adverbs, restrictions on two different scalar elements, one of them being temporal, coaiesce. As venir de + INF can be replaced by a perfect tense in some contexts, it is compared to the
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