Thomas Wasow

Coordination and how to distinguish categories

ConclusionIn this paper we have presented a detailed treatment of key problems in the syntax of coordination in English which goes well beyond previous treatments in the breadth of its coverage.The separation of immediate dominance rules from linear precedence rules had played an essential role in our analysis. It is this aspect of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar that allows the full range of conjunctions in English to be treated in a unified manner using a small set of constructs. This same factoring of dominance and ordering information is what allows us to account for such problems as the peculiar properties of the coordination of embedded clauses and NPs, as we have shown. In addition, it is the interplay of various independently motivated principles in GPSG, such as the Head Feature Convention and the Foot Feature Principle, that enable one to derive, rather than stipulate, a solution to such long-standing problems as the facts commonly discussed in terms of the Coordinate Structure Constraint and the Across-the-Board Convention.Over twenty years ago, the syntax of coordination was a key topic in the discussions that led to the widespread acceptance of transformational grammar. It is curious, then, that even today no version of transformational grammar has succeeded in explaining, and often not even in describing, well-known and very basic facts about coordination (e.g., the fact that arbitrary tensed VPs can coordinate with each other). Moreover, the various instances of coordination of unlike categories, which we have provided an account of without appeal to any ancillary devices or ad hoc principles, have received no serious analysis within the transformational tradition.Of course, much remains to be done on the grammar of coordinate constructions. Among the problems we have addressed insufficiently or not at all are the precise formulation of the syntax and semantics of non-constituent ellipsis, the treatment of ‘right node raising’ constructions, and the semantic peculiarities of N1-coordination discussed by Bergmann (1982). Nevertheless, the present paper improves on earlier generative treatments of coordination by broadening the coverage while at the same time stipulating less.

Remarks on grammatical weight

Long, complex phrases tend to come at the ends of clauses; this is called “endweight.” A variety of characterizations of weight have been proposed in the literature, but none has been sufficient to cover the full range of attested cases of end-weight. Corpus data on heavy NP shift, the dative alternation, and particle movement indicate that there are several structural measures of weight that are highly correlated with constituent ordering. Proposed explanations for endweight have been based on parsing considerations, largely ignoring the speaker; but what facilitates parsing does not always help in production. Examination of phenomena where these interests do not coincide indicates that the demands of sentence planning provide a better explanation for end-weight than parsing. Finally, accounts of end-weight cannot be purely structure-based, but must take lexical factors into consideration.

Alternative conceptions of phrase structure

In the early years of generative grammar it was assumed that the appropriate mechanism for generating syntactic structures was a grammar of context-free rewriting rules. The twelve essays in this volume discuss recent challenges to this classical formulation of phrase structure and the alternative conceptions proposed to replace it. Each article approaches this issue from the perspective of a different linguistic framework, such as categorical grammar, government-binding theory, head-driven phrase structure grammar, and tree-adjoining grammar. By contributing to the understanding of the differing assumptions and research strategies of each theory, this volume serves as an important survey of current thinking on the frontier of theoretical and computation linguistics.

End-Weight from the Speaker's Perspective

Explanations of the tendency to put long, complex constituents at the ends of sentences (“end-weight”) usually take the listeners perspective, claiming it facilitates parsing. I argue for a speaker-oriented explanation of end-weight, based on how it facilitates utterance planning. Parsing is facilitated when as much tree structure as possible can be determined early in the string, but production is easiest when options for how to continue are kept open. That is, listeners should prefer early commitment and speakers should prefer late commitment. Corpus data show that different verbs exhibit different rates of word-order variation that are systematically related to differences in subcategorization possibilities in just the way predicted by a strategy of late commitment. Thus, a speaker-based account of lexical preferences in word ordering does a better job of explaining variation in weight effects than a listener-based account.

Anaphora in Generative Grammar

Intuitively, it is clear why languages have anaphoric relations: anaphora reduces redundancy, thereby shortening (and hence simplifying) sentences. In order for this simplification to be possible, however, it is necessary that the speaker of a language be able to identify correctly the elements participating in an anaphoric relation and to determine correctly the meaning of the anaphor on the basis of meaning of the antecedent. If a grammar is to reflect the linguistic competence of a native speaker of a language, it must include mechanisms of associating anaphor and antecedent. In this volume the following questions will be considered: What sorts of mechanisms are best suited for representing anaphora in a grammar? What are the conditions on the rule(s) associating anaphors with antecedents? Do the various cases of anaphora form a linguistically significant class of phenomena, and, if so, how can the grammar capture this fact? And what do these answers entail for linguistic theory?

Task-specificity and species-specificity in the study of language: A methodological note ☆

Some linguists and some psychologists find the following questions to be at the heart of their professional interests. (A) What is distinctively human about human intelligence? That is, in what ways is human intelligence the same as, and in what ways is it different from, other logically possible kinds of intellect, including but not restricted to the other biological species and existing computers? (B) In what ways do the several human faculties resemble each other and in what ways do they diverge? That is, what revealing comparisons can be made among the mental systems that constitute the competencies underlying language, logic, ethics, and aesthetics, among others? (A) and (B) are intimately related, both to each other, and to questions of ontogenesis. In this paper we wish to make some methodological remarks about the kind of answers they may receive. Both questions ask for comparisons, in the case of (A) among species of intelligence, in the case of (B) among human faculties. We take it to be obvious that such comparisons, to be revealing, must be made at a sufficiently theoretical level. Superficial differences in two phenomena can obscure deeper similarities that show up only in light of adequate theories for each; the same goes for superificial similarities and deeper differences. So (A) and (B) can be reformulated as follows.

INTENSIVE AND QUOTATIVE ALL: SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW

this article presents a synchronic and diachronic investigation of the lexeme all in its intensifier and quotative functions. We delimit the new from the old functions of the lexeme and present a variationist account of all ’s external and internal constraints in various syntactic environments. our analysis is based on a variety of data sets, which include traditional sociolinguistic interviews as well as data culled from internet searches and a new Google-based search tool. on the basis of these data sets, we show that intensifier all is not new but has expanded in syntactic environments. We further pinpoint the syntactic and semantic niches which all has appropriated for itself among California adolescents and compare its patterning with that of other intensifiers in our data and the data of other researchers. All ’s extension to quotative function, however, is new, apparently originating in California in the 1980s. our investigation of its development spans across data sets from 15 years. using variable rule analysis and other quantitative techniques, we examine the distribution of quotative all vis-a-vis its competitor variants (including be like, say, and go) and show that the constraints on quotative all have undergone a marked shift in recent years and that quotative all is in decline right now, after peaking in the 1990s. the lexeme all in its intensifier and quotative functions (as in 1a and 1b, respectively) occurs commonly in media representations of adolescents’ speech: 1. a. my mom is all mad at me. [Jerry Scott and Jim borgman, “Zits” (comic strip), king features, Aug. 30, 2005] b. the dog just—she was all “bark! bark! bark!” [ibid, July 28, 2005] in the only published article devoted to these uses of all, Waksler (2001, 128) describes both quotative all and intensifier all as “ new constructions” in the speech of adolescents and young adults in San francisco:

Lectures on contemporary syntactic theories : an introduction to government-binding theory, generalized phrase structure grammar, and lexical-functional grammar

This books provides an introduction to three contemporary syntactic theories, Government-Binding Theory, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, and Lexical-Functional Grammar. In successive chapters, Sells lucidly presents and illustrates the fundamental apsects of each theory. In an introductory chapter he describes the basic syntactic concepts and assumptions shared by each theory; in the postscript, Thomas Wasow provides a more general overview of the different perspectives of these three approaches.

The sociolinguistics of a short-lived innovation: Tracing the development of quotative all across spoken and internet newsgroup data

ABSTRACT Thispaperexaminesashort-livedinnovation,quotativeall,inrealandapparenttime.Weusedatwo-prongedmethodtotracethetrajectoryofalloverthepasttwodecades:(i) Quantitativeanalysesofthe quotativesystem ofyoungCalifornians fromdifferentdecades;thisrevealsastartlingcrossoverpattern:in1990/1994,allpredominates,butby 2005, it has given way to like. (ii) Searches of Internet newsgroups; these confirmthat after rising briskly in the 1990s, all is declining. Tracing the changing usage ofquotative options provides year-to-year evidence that all has recently given way tolike. Our paper has two aims: We provide insights from ongoing language changeregarding short-term innovations in the history of English. We also discuss ourcollaboration with Google Inc. and argue for the value of newsgroups to researchprojects investigating linguistic variation and change in real time, especially whererecorded conversational tokens are relatively sparse. AnearlierversionofthispaperwaspresentedatNWAV35(NewWaysofAnalyzingVariation)atOhioState University in Columbus. We are grateful forcomments from the audience,in particularto John V.SinglerandMaryBucholtz.Allremainingerrorsare,ofcourse,ourown.WearegratefultoJohnSinglerandotherreviewersofthispaperfortheirhelpfulfeedbackon anearlierdraft. WethankGoogleInc.forthe opportunity to collaborate on this exciting project, drawing on their both personnel and facilities.Many thanks go to Thorsten Brants for his enthusiasm for and support of the project as well as forhis enormous input in terms of computational methods. We are also indebted to David Hall fordeveloping and implementing the tools needed to do the searches we requested and for respondingswiftly and extensively to all our queries and suggestions. Thanks are due to Carmen Fought,Rachelle Waksler, and Ann Wimmer for allowing us to use their data on quotative all and otherforms from the 1980s and 1990s as well as to Bob Bayley and Mackenzie Price for guidance withstatistical analysis. Finally, we are grateful to Stanford faculty colleagues for their input and toseveral Stanford students who provided substantial assistance with data collection and analysisbetween 2004 and 2010, especially Zoe Bogart, Crissy Brown, Kayla Carpenter, Tracy Conner,Kristle McCracken, Rowyn McDonald, Cybelle Smith, Francesca Smith, and Laura Whitton.

On constraining the class of transformational languages

The need to add constraints to the theory of transformational grammar has been one (perhaps the) central goal of research by generative grammarians over the last decade. A number of important proposals have resulted from this research, most notably those due to Bresnan (1976), Chomsky (1973), Culicover and Wexler (1977), Emonds (1976), and Ross (1967). The first section of this paper is devoted to distinguishing between and considering the relative merits of two different views of the purpose of such constraints. The second and third sections attempt to add substance to my position by showing how progress towards the goals defended in the first section can be achieved.