James D. McCawley

English as a VSO Language

1. A PREREQUISITE. To increase the likelihood of this papers being intelligible, I will preface it with a brief summary (largely a restatement of results in unpublished papers by Ross and Lakoff) of an important notion that recurs in it, namely that of the CYCLE. I will assume in what follows that the transformational component of a grammar divides up into three sub-systems of rules: pre-cyclic transformations, the cycle, and post-cyclic transformations. I will ignore pre-cyclic transformations, since the one known pre-cyclic transformation (namely the sentence pronominalization which gives rise to the it of such sentences as Margaret is believed by many to be pregnant, but she denies it) is irrelevant to my argument. The rules of the cycle are ordered, as are the post-cyclic transformations. All the rules of the cycle apply in sequence first to the innermost sentence, then all the rules of the cycle apply to the next higher sentence, etc. Thus, an application of a rule of the cycle to an embedded sentence precedes all applications of that or any other cyclic transformation to the sentence in which it is embedded. The following illustrates the kind of grounds on which one can conclude that certain transformations have to be in the cycle. There is a transformation, called EQUI-NP-DELETION, which deletes the first noun phrase of an embedded clause if it matches a certain NP of the clause containing it, as in Max wants to drink a daiquiri, where the subject of drink has been deleted under identity with the subject of want (Fig. 1).1 There is another transformation (/known under a variety of names) which I will refer to as SUBJECT-RAISING; it applies to certain sentences containing an embedded clause, moving both the subject and the remainder of the embedded clause into the higher clause, as in Arthur seems to admire Spiro, which arises from an underlying structure in which seem is an intransitive verb whose subject is the sentence Arthur admires Spiro (Fig. 2). The interaction of these two transformations is seen in the sentences (1) Boris wants to seem to understand physics. (2) Boris seems to want to understand physics.

Everything That Linguists Have Always Wanted to Know about Logic

McCawley supplements his earlier book-which covers such topics as presuppositional logic, the logic of mass terms and nonstandard quantifiers, and fuzzy logic-with new material on the logic of conditional sentences, linguistic applications of type theory, Anil Guptas work on principles of identity, and the generalized quantifier approach to the logical properties of determiners.

The Logic of Common Nouns: An Investigation in Quantified Modal Logic.

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The syntax and semantics of english relative clauses

Abstract An analysis of English restrictive relative clauses is developed that accounts for many of the differences between them and three other clause types having the same internal structure, namely nonrestrictive relative clauses, cleft clauses, and ‘pseudo-relative’ clauses as in There are many Americans who like baseball . Section 1 is devoted to establishing the surface constituent structures of sentences involving the various relative and relative-like clauses. In sections 1 and 2 I provide evidence that pseudo-relative clauses are not restrictive relative clauses (nor are they nonrestrictive clauses) and indicate which apparent relative clauses must be classed as pseudo-relative. Section 3 is concerned with the derivation of nonrestrictive clauses. Sections 4 and 5 deal with two different analyses of restrictive relatives, each of which is supported by a sizeable body of data and appears to be irreconcileable with the data that support the other analysis. In section 6 an attempt is made to achieve a synthesis of the two analyses on the basis of a ‘core’ of grammatical rules proper and a set of ‘patches’ that serve to extend the speakers competence to cover cases for which the core rules do not yield admissible derivations. The analyses developed make extensive use of the conception of syntactic category that is developed in McCawley 1977a, 1980b.

A Program for Logic

Chomsky’s Aspects (1965) described and presented justification for a model of linguistic structure according to which the relation between sentences (or better, the surface structures of sentences) and their semantic structures was mediated by a level of Deep Structure: a grammar consisted of a Base Component, which was a set of rules that specified what deep structures were possible in the language in question, a Transformational Component, which was a system of rules that specified how deep structures corresponded to surface structures1, and a Semantic Component, which was a system of rules that associated a set of semantic representations to each deep structure. Since the appearance of Aspects, there have been two opposing lines of development in transformational grammar, the principal differences between which relate to the syntax/semantics dichotomy which the theory of Aspects presupposes

Remarks on the syntax of Mandarin yes-no questions

According to C.-T. Huand (1991), Chinese “A-not-a questions” are not syntactically unitary but fall into two types whose syntax has literally nothing in common. I argue that Huang is incorrect in assimilating the “disjunctive” variety of A-not-A questions to alternative questions, in that disjunctive questions are subject to a number of restrictions that do not apply to alternative questions, for example, a restriction that the positive conjunct precede the negative one. While accepting the basic idea of Huangs rule for “reduplicative” A-not-A questions, I note that restrictions on negation are mirrored not only in disjunctive questions where, for Huang the negative element is a real negation, but also in reduplicative questions, where for Huang there is only an apparent negation. I conclude that the full spectrum of A-not-A questions in Chinese reflects not synchronically unrelated constructions but rather different ways of specializing an, alternative question for the function of a yes-no question.

Towards Plausibility in Theories of Language Acquisition

A number of recent articles (e.g. Braine 1971, Baker 1979) have taken up the question of how a child can learn a language without reliance on large amounts of negative grammaticality data, i.e. data of the form ‘X is not grammatical as a sentence of language L’. The authors note that the most obvious source of negative grammaticality data, namely corrections of the child’s speech by adults and older children, in fact plays only a small role in language acquisition. Baker also notes that in the case of the most commonly attested corrections, namely those relating to morphological irregularities (“Don’t say dood, say did”), the positive aspect of the correction provides all the data that the child needs: since specific rules (as Panini, Kiparsky, and Koutsoudas et al. tell us) take precedence over general rules, when the child learns that the past tense of do is did, he will automatically stop saying dood regardless of whether he ever learned that dood is unacceptable. The child is thus in an important respect not a little linguist: negative data provide much of the factual basis for argumentation by big linguists, but little of the data that the child has available for use in learning a grammar.

Today the world, tomorrow phonology*

Generative phonological research has typically relied heavily on gratuitous assumptions about the particular morphemic decompositions that are by convention treated as data, about the relevance of those decompositions to the determination of underlying forms, and about the individuation of linguistic phenomena. I discuss a number of topics that take on a different complexion when these gratuitous assumptions are avoided: the identification of particular segments as making up underlying forms, which is far more problematic than has hitherto been recognised; various prior studies that can be interpreted as showing that ‘Vowel Shift’, while playing some role in the competence of speakers of English, has much less generality than standard tenets of generative phonology would lead one to expect; and individual variation in perceived morphemic relations among words. I report on an experiment that demonstrates the existence of such variation and provides evidence for individual differences in the system of vowel alternations and in the status of vowel shift alternations in that system.

What's with with?

The absolute construction exemplified by with the bus drivers on strike consists of with plus a constituent that possesses all the characteristics typical of embedded Ss, except for having to contain a verb: it serves as a domain for cyclic application of transformations, it serves as a scope for quantifiers and negatives, and its elements do not command elements of the main clause. An analysis of these constituents as underlying Ss, subject to optional deletion of be (or of possessional have and its subject) explains why this construction allows adverbs as adjuncts to constituents that normally do not support adverbs. Peculiarities of the distribution of adverbs in the construction support the contention that the NP in with NP PP is an underlying subject of be in some cases, an underlying object of have in others.

The dark side of reason

In his Farewell to Reason, Paul Feyerabend advocates radical pluralism in all intellectual endeavors and disputes the widely held belief that all issues can and should be resolved rationally. For Feyerabend, it is desirable that mutually incompatible approaches to scientific and scholarly research proliferate. Even an approach that ones favored school of thought dismisses as loony is likely to yield ideas and factual observations that its derogators will find of value and would otherwise have missed. To derive intellectual benefit from an alternative tradition, one need not accept its premises and values; likewise, to ignore uncongenial ideas, one is not obliged to construct a refutation of than, which is just as well, since such a refutation usually can be constructed only by stacking the cards against adversaries about whom one is grossly ignorant.