Surface syntax of English: a formal model within the meaning-text framework (Linguistic & Literary Studies in Eastern Europe)

SURFACE SYNTAX OF ENGLISH

LINGUISTIC & LITERARY STUDIES IN EASTERN EUROPE (LLSEE) The emphasis of this scholarly series is on recent developments in Linguistic and Literary Research in Eastern Europe; it includes analysis, translations and syntheses of current research as well as studies in the history of linguistic and literary scholarship.

Founding Editor: John Odmark General Editor: Philip A. Luelsdorff

Volume 13

Igor A. Mel'cuk & Nikolaj V. Pertsov Surface Syntax of English  Formal Model within the Meaning-Text Framework

SURFACE SYNTAX OF ENGLISH A FORMAL MODEL WITHIN THE MEANING-TEXT FRAMEWORK

Igor A. Mel'čuk and Nikolaj V. Pertsov

Editor: Richard Kittredge

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA 1987

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Mel'cuk, I.A. (Igor' Aleksandrovič), 1932Surface syntax of English. (Linguistic & literary studies in Eastern Europe (LLSEE), ISSN 0165-7712; v. 13) Bibliography: p. Includes indexes. 1. English language - Syntax. I. Pertsov, Nikolaj V. (Nikolaj Viktorovic), 1944Title. III. Series. PE1361.M45 1987 425 86-6884 ISBN 90 272 1515 4 (alk. paper)

. II.

© Copyright 1987 - John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher.

To all our American friends. (No names need be mentioned, need they?)

"Farewell,  Muses! And you, Grammar, be gone with them as well Lest that damned Syntax of yours hasten me into my grave!" Palladius, a Greek poet of Alexandria, IV-V centuries A.D.

CONTENTS Editor's Preface

xiii

Foreword

xv

Acknowledgements Introduction

xvii 1

§1.

Three raisons d'être of this Book

§2.

Five Main Characteristics of the Syntactic Approach in this Book . 1. Framework of analysis 2. Utterance representations at different levels 3. A static viewpoint 4. Dependency trees 5. Labeled surface-syntactic relations

4 5 6 6 7 8

§3.

Organization of this Book

9

Chapter I.

A Brief Outline of the Meaning-Text Theory and the Corres­ ponding Linguistic Model

1

12

§1.

General Remarks

12

§2.

Levels of Utterance Representation in the Meaning-Text Model .

15

§3.

General Design of the Meaning-Text Model

34

§4.

Five Basic Principles of the Meaning-Text Approach

43

Chapter II.

Surface-Syntactic Representation for English Sentences . . .

46

§ 1.

General Characterization of the Surface-Syntactic Representation ..

46

§2.

Surface-Syntactic Structure 1. Dependency trees 2. Correspondence between the nodes of a D-tree and the wordforms of the sentence it represents 3. Deep-morphological representation of a wordform 4. Surface-syntactic relation

48 48 57 58 61

x

CONTENTS 5. §3. §4.

Grouping in dependency structures

72

Conditions for Grammatical Correctness of English Surface-Syntac­ tic Structures

78

Surface-Syntactic Relations in Modern English

85

Specimens of Surface-Syntactic Structures for English Sentences . . . . Chapter III.

157

Deep-Morphological Representation for English Sentences .

163

General Characterization of the Deep-Morphological Representa­ tion (of a Sentence)

163

§2.

Deep-Morphological Structure

165

§3.

Conditions for Grammatical Correctness of English Deep-Morpho­ logical Structures

166

§ 1.

§4.

Morphological Variables and Values of Wordforms in Modern Eng­ lish 167

Chapter IV.

Surface-Syntactic Component of English

178

§1.

General Characterization of the Surface-Syntactic Component

.

178

§2.

The Notion of Syntagm 1. Characterization of the syntagm 2. Means and devices for a more compact syntagm notation . . . Standard subtrees Standard functions General conditions for groups of syntagms Compounding syntagms Variables in syntagms 3. Classification of syntagms

186 187 191 192 193 195 195 196 198

§3.

Syntagms of Modern English Guide to the List of Modern English Syntagms List of Modern English Syntagms

198 200 216

Appendix I.

Parts of Speech and Syntactic Features of English Lexemes .

Appendix II. Standard Subtrees A.

Internal Structure of Standard Subtrees

471 485 485

CONTENTS

xi

B.

External Connections of Standard Subtrees

490

C.

Distribution (among the Individual Nodes of the Subtree) of Labels that are Attached to the Subtree Symbol as a Whole

491

Appendix III. List of English Lexemes Mentioned in Syntagms ('Syntactic' Lexemes)

493

Appendix IV. Samples of English Syntactic Phenomena Unaccounted for in the Proposed Description 501 References

507

Subject and Term Index

521

EDITOR'S PREFACE

The publication of Surface Syntax of English (SSE) by Igor Mel'cuk and Nikolaj Pertsov marks a significant event in the continuing dialogue between theoretical and computational linguistics. Here we have one of the most complete formalized grammars of English ever published. This is an important book for at least three reasons. First of all, the SSE consti­ tutes a major contribution to the syntactic description of English. By its broad inventory of syntactic structures and use of more nuanced and explicitly labeled syntactic relations, it sets a high standard for completeness of description. The relatively few constructions not included in the formal description are nevertheless listed with a discussion of the problems they raise. The SSE's breadth of coverage is equalled by the wealth of syntactic and lexical detail given for each construction, often in support of new and insightful analyses of the phenomena of English grammar. Because of this, it will surely take its place as one of the leading reference works on English. Second, beyond the breadth and depth of its coverage, the SSE is important for an entirely separate and particularly timely reason.  and Pertsov's grammatical description is very well suited to and inspired by the demands of computer processing of natural language. Although the descriptive framework does not impose a procedural view of grammatical analysis (and is in fact perfectly suited to the static or non-directional views of grammar now popular), the syntactic descrip­ tions presented here are expressed in a formal language that lends itself to a relatively direct translation into rules executable by a computer program. Such rules can serve both for automatic analysis and synthesis of text. Moreover, the grammatical insights contained in this book have profited from the more than two decades of experience of Mel'cuk and his colleagues in machine translation and text synthesis (or "genera­ tion"). This brings us to the third reason for this book's importance. The SSE is expres­ sed within the framework of the Meaning-Text Theory of language description. It presents a succinct overview of the MTT model, and then gives this model new life by showing exactly how it treats the important syntactic phenomena of English. The

XIV

EDITOR'S PREFACE

MTT model, developed over a period of twenty years by a group of Soviet linguists led by Mel'čuk, first became known to Western linguists in the late 1960's when it was used as a basis for machine translation systems. Although the MTT gained a number of adherents during the 1970's, its spread in the West has to date been hindered by the lack of sufficiently developed treatments of English. This book should go a long way towards making the MTT accessible to a broad community of linguists and computer scientists, who may now give it the attention it deserves. The SSE is also a book which makes serious demands on the reader. Many linguists, having been raised in the tradition of phrase structure grammar, will want to look carefully at the theoretical overview (chapter I). The use of a dependency formalism, which downplays phrases and their syntactic categories in favor of lexical items and explicit syntactic relations among them, requires nothing short of a re-thinking of syntax. Speakers of languages such as English may need some time to appreciate the fact that Mel'cuk's dependency trees, with their explicitly labeled syntactic relations, derive some of their merit from being far better for representing "word-order free" languages (including Russian). It is only fair to say that the preparation of this book also made heavy demands on the editors, typists, proofreaders and typesetters, and all others who played a role in bringing it into being. Very few of us foresaw what we were in for in 1980 as we planned the production of this essentially finished book. As for myself I must apologize for the time it has taken, and for not having succeeded in shortening and tidying all of Igor's herculean sentences. Those which remain should be seen as monuments to an irrepressible spirit, always ready to sneak in another example or improve the content by yet another parenthetical. Let it be known, however, that the hiker-author who always carries the heaviest pack was also the one who did more than all others combined to speed the production and make the SSE a reality.

R.K., September 11, 1986

FOREWORD

The present book has come into being as the result of joint work by Nikolaj Pertsov and myself. We started studying English surface syntax, with a system of automatic text processing in view, in Moscow — as early as 1970. Our first preliminary report was published as Mel'cuk and Percov 1973a, followed by Mel'cuk and Percov 1973b, which contained a tentative list of English surfacesyntactic relations. Then a complete list of English syntagms (roughly, surfacesyntactic rules) appeared: Mel'cuk and Percov 1975. We had another year and a half to check our description against texts, discuss it with colleagues, and collect more data. In May 1977 I was forced to leave the Soviet Union, and the close contact with my friend Pertsov was thereby broken. It became impossible to continue working on the book together with a distance of several thousand kilometers between us; so I had to take the entire responsibility upon myself and go ahead to the best of my personal abilities, without Dr. Pertsov at my side, deprived of his logical insights, his particular attention to important details, and his excellent knowledge of the whole system. In the final version, this book contains two papers written by us together: Mel'cuk and Percov 1973b (= § 4 of Chapter II) and 1975 (= § 3 of Chapter IV), as well as Appendices I through IV, all of them heavily corrected and in some places completely reworked by myself. These two sections make up, quantitatively and conceptually, the kernel of the book. The rest, i.e. Introduction, Chapters I and III, §§ 1—3 of Chapter II, and §§ 1—2 of Chapter IV have been written by myself, so that I am alone to blame for all the shortcomings to be found there. To conclude my foreword, I would like to express my most heartfelt gratitude to the following people, whose assistance has been vital in the preparation of the manuscript : — Leo Stern, who translated Mel'cuk and Percov 1975 into English and so laid the foundations of the book; — Leo Elnitsky, who went through the whole mansucript many times, hunting down errors, clumsy expressions, misprints, etc.; — Line Arè s, who kindly agreed to type the manuscript, and Marc Blain, who made all the necessary arrangements; t For bibliographic reasons the name of Nikolaj Pertsov is spelled Percov in the references through­ out; see also note 1 on p. 15.

XVI

FOREWORD

— Céline eauchemin, who was instrumental in typing into the final draft of the book an astronomically large number of corrections and additions; — Richard Kittredge, who has done for me everything a good friend can do for a friend, and a good editor must do for a book he is working on; — and the late John Odmark (1937—1980), who invited me to publish the book in a series he was editing. Before his untimely death of a heart attack, he encouraged me to continue my work on it and negotiated its publication with Benjamins Publishers.

Igor Mel'čuk, Montreal, Winter 1985

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The first version of § 4, Chapter II of the present book (= list of surface-syn­ tactic relations), was read by Ju. D. Apresjan, A.S. Čexov, L.L. Iomdin, David Kilby, O.S. Kulagina, and Z.M. Saljapina; Sheldon Klein checked most of our examples. § 3 of Chapter IV (= list of syntagms) was carefully studied by Z.M. Saljapina. The final text of Mel'cuk and Percov 1975 was read by L.L. Iomdin, David Kilby, L.N. lordanskaja, Johanna Nichols, and N.N. Pertsova. Of particular value were the remarks and suggestions made by D. Kilby and J. Nichols, who saved us from many blunders. The completed manuscript of the book underwent a scrutinizing examination by Ju. D. Apresjan, L.L. Elnitsky, L.N. lordanskaja, and Ian Mackenzie; Chapters I through III were read by Alan Dench and J. Nichols. James Steele helped us with the proofreading. We wish to thank all the above-mentioned colleagues and friends for their criticisms and assistance in connection with the book. Of course, none of them should be held responsible for any inconsistencies or errors that may have survi­ ved.

INTRODUCTION

This Introduction is intended to answer the following three questions: 1. What have we written this book for? 2. What are the most salient characteristics of our syntactic approach — and what is our main concern in the book? 3. How is the book organized? Each question is taken up in a special section. §1 Three raisons d'être of this Book To write a fairly complete description of English syntax is an extremely dif­ ficult task; for foreigners, like ourselves, without a perfect command of the language, it may well be impossible. Why, then, try it at all? Our reasons are im­ portant, and they must be explained in order not only to justify our efforts, but also to help our reader understand better what we are after. • First, this book is written within a new theoretical framework called the Meaning-Text Model Theory. (Chapter I explains this theory in some detail.) Eng­ lish, so widely known and so well studied, offered us exceptional illustrative ma­ terial — in the sense that to prove the utility of a new linguistic theory one simp­ ly has to show how it works for English. Moreover, since semantics is relatively universal and English morphology is so poor, it is exactly the syntactic level that is best suited to our purpose. English syntax is richly developed and sufficiently 'exotic' to provide many challenging problems. So we needed this model of Eng­ lish syntax as a piece of evidence in favor of the Meaning-Text linguistic theory. • Second, strange as it may seem, in 1980, when this manuscript was being completed, there was, to the best of our knowledge, no description of English syntax that is simultaneously FORMAL, COMPLETE, and THEORETICALLYORIENTED. Such major contributions to the study of English syntax as Jespersen 1909— 49, Poutsma 1926—29, or Kruisinga 1931—32, with all their permanent relevance to the field, are in no way formal (which does not of course diminish their value); cf., however, Jespersen 1969, which tries, and with excellent results, to introduce a formalism into syntactic descriptions — but deals more with the theory of ge­ neral syntax than with English.

2

SURFACE SYNTAX OF ENGLISH

Stockwell et al. 1973, on the contrary, uses an elaborate transformational formalism, providing a coherent picture of many surface-syntactic phenomena of English, but it is very far from complete (an exhaustive description of English was not the authors' goal). Huddleston 1975, with all its clarity, is, as the author himself puts it, "rather an introduction to the general theory of transformationalgenerative grammar, with extensive and systematic exemplification from selected areas of English" (page IX). Likewise, Chomsky 1975, rich in profound insights and thought-provoking analyses, is devoted to sharpening the methodology of transformational-generative grammar and consolidating the foundations of the theory, not to a systematic description of English structure. Emonds 1976 is also somewhat in the same line. The author aims at creating "a sort of handbook of (English and French based) syntactic theory" (p. vii), not a description of Eng­ lish syntax. Therefore, his main thrust is ramified syntactic argumentation in fa­ vor of or against various transformational analyses of some particular construc­ tions. (The book does contain, however, interesting descriptive statements concerning the there is/are construction, for-to infinitive, parentheticals, place­ ment of adverbiais, etc.) Sager 1968 is both formal and fairly complete but was intended for computer text processing, and because of this is overloaded with technical details; more­ over, until recently it was not available as a regular publication (now see Sager 1981). There are several computer-oriented descriptions of the same kind, but they are virtually unavailable on the general market. As an example, Kittredge 1973 can be mentioned, including Annex I of the same progress report (pp. 117— 178). This is a fully formalized surface-syntactic description of English but it is oriented exclusively towards automatic text analysis and is presented in a com­ puter-encoded form. Huddleston 1971 and Quirk et al. 1972 both are very accurate descriptions, rigorous and consistent; both approach our ideal to some extent. However, the former is neither quite complete nor sufficiently formalized, while the latter in­ cludes some non-syntactic sections (morphology, word-formation, and the like) and is not formalized either. A very special place belongs to Nida 1966 (written as early as 1943, though first published in 1960). It still remains the most extensive description of English syntactic constructions in terms of immediate constituents, i.e. phrase-structure, — but with indication of the head constituent, where it is relevant from Nida's viewpoint (in so-called endocentric constructions). Moreover, Nida characterizes the prosody of every construction on the surface (the pitch and the pauses, as well as the stress); he is rather an exception in this respect. He also supplies lists

INTRODUCTION

3

of words capable of filling a given position in the given construction. Very de­ tailed and accurate, Nida's Synopsis served for us as a primary source of data (and examples) and a model of clear organization. However, with its venerable age, the volume cannot be deemed quite satisfactory from the viewpoint of to­ day's theoretical standards. In addition, a higher level of formalization seems achievable now. Thus we try, with the present book, to fill a gap existing in the literature, by providing a systematic and relatively complete description of English surface syntax which is, at the same time, fully formal yet not designed exclusively for computer processing — but rather for human readers. At this point, an important clarification seems in order. When speaking of this book as of a relatively complete description, we mean that we try to describe the WHOLE of English surface syntax, and not some selected parts of it, as is often done in many contemporary syntactic studies. Of course we do not claim exhaustiveness of our data or definitive coverage of all the problems we raise. On the contrary, the number of lacunae we are aware of is very large (some of them will be indicated below). But our intention has been to outline, within the limits of our possibilities, the entire surface-syntactic edifice of English from the foun­ dations to the rooftop, even if several partitions will be absent, many walls unfi­ nished, some toilets leaking, etc. • Third, nearly all the formalized presentations of English syntax we have heard of use phrase-structure formalism with the addition of transformations (in the sense of Chomsky). The only exception known to date is string grammar, launched in Harris 1962. But string grammar is still closely enough related to the phrase-structure approach; moreover, until recently it has not been very popular with specialists of English syntax (Sager 1968 and 1981, mentioned previously, are unique in using the string grammar formalism). Lytle 1974 should probably be mentioned in this connection, too. The book presents an inventory of syntactic rules in English (40 rules covering all major ty­ pes of English phrases) written in terms of a new formalism, devised by the author: so-called junction grammar. But as far as we can see, this is again a varie­ ty of the phrase-structure approach (although avoiding the use of transforma­ tions). In contrast to all these works, in the present book we put forth the pure formalism of dependency trees, a novelty for many Western linguists. Although syntactic representations in terms of dependencies have been discussed in Ameri­ can professional journals (e.g., Hays 1964b and Robinson 1970a, b) and even

4

SURFACE SYNTAX OF ENGLISH

more often in Europe (see references on page 78), a full-fledged description of English using the syntactic dependency formalism has never been attempted be­ fore, as far as we know. Yet, the dependency formalism seems to us to be the best one for the description of syntactic phenomena in any language. This con­ viction has prompted us to show its various advantages on the basis of English data. To summarize, we have written this book with three goals in mind: — to present a fully elaborated fragment of a specific Meaning-Text model, and do it for a well-known language, in order to make the model available to the widest possible range of linguists; — to provide a complete, formal and theory-oriented description of English surface syntax; — to apply the syntactic dependency formalism to English. Let it be stated that we are not attempting a systematic review of the enorm­ ous literature on English syntax. We cannot do more than indicate a few works that have a direct bearing on what we are discussing. A solid bibliography is now available for the serious student of English syntax: Smith and Johnsen 1981. §2 Five Main Characteristics of the Syntactic Approach in this Book In order to facilitate the reading of our syntactic description, it may be helpful to state how it compares with other descriptions known in the field. But even a cursory survey of the existing literature is out of the question for reasons of space. Therefore, we will limit ourselves to briefly outlining some of the basic elements of the approach adopted in this book, emphasizing what seems to us most relevant. To do this, though, we will need certain concepts and notions that are introduced and explained only later on. So we ask our reader to have patience and be satisfied for the moment with less than a full exposition. In this section, we aim at a very general picture, leaving out all the details. Our description of English surface syntax is characterized by the following five properties: 1. A maximally restrictive and narrow framework of analysis. 2. A stratificational viewpoint: emphasis on representations of utterances at dif­ ferent levels. 3. A static viewpoint: no generation, no transformations, no ordering of the rules.

INTRODUCTION

5

4. Dependency trees as the only descriptive apparatus for surface-syntactic structure. 5. Extensive use of labeled surface-syntactic relations. The first'three properties are by no means specific to syntax: they are characte­ ristic of the whole Meaning-Text Model, of which our surface-syntactic descrip­ tion is only one component. The last two, on the contrary, are exclusively syn­ tactic. 1. Framework of analysis In this book, we try to keep the domain of our description as narrow and restricted as possible in at least two respects. First, we deal only with the most neutral variety of Written Standard English, as used in the United States. Our main object of study is non-fiction prose (scientific, journalistic, and the like), although we also use sentences from novels and short stories provided they are not archaic, too informal or overly collo­ quial. Our slogan is 'No marginal phenomena'. What is covered by our model belongs to the common core of different styles, registers, and sublanguages of American English. Second, we concentrate on surface-syntactic structure only and exclude various related problems that often emerge in syntactic descriptions of English. For example, take such pairs of sentences as They quickly sold the book vs. The book sold quickly or Mary washed the clothes clean vs. The clothes washed clean. The use of the verbs in the second members of these pairs (called 'ergative verbs' in Huddleston 1971: 65ff. and analysed in van Oosten 1977), the nuances of their meaning, their cooccurrence with modais or adverbs may take up dozens of pages in a work on English syntax. But to us, all this belongs to lexicography or semantics, or, possibly, to deep syntax, rather than to surface syntax, which is our only concern. Similarly, we do not discuss such topics as subject- and ob­ ject-raising, the use of passive as opposed to active voice, selection of terms of address, and many other such questions. This approach follows one of the main principles of the Meaning-Text model theory: a strict separation of all linguistic levels and strata, each to be treated in the most autonomous way possible and then related to the others by special rules. Let it be emphasized that the restrictiveness of the approach we have adopted does not conflict with our objective of completeness. We intend to be complete and systematic WITHIN THE NARROW RANGE OF PHENOMENA we have set out for ourselves at the beginning. Our field is small: only the surface syntax

6

SURFACE SYNTAX OF ENGLISH

of only the most typical major sentence types in only the most neutral style of Written Standard American English. Yet this field is well delineated and we claim to have plowed it thoroughly. 2. Utterance representations at different levels Prior to formulating any linguistic model, we introduce representations of utterances at those levels that are of interest to us. In this particular case, these are the surface-syntactic representation and the deep-morphological representa­ tion of English sentences. Linguistic representations must be written in formali­ zed languages constructed by the researcher, and their justification or substantia­ tion is completely outside the linguistic model as such. The only task a linguistic model is supposed to perform is to ensure the correspondence between two representations of adjacent levels, and nothing beyond that. A simple comparison may help to grasp this idea. Suppose we are to translate a text from Japanese into English; then our problem is not to discuss Japanese or English, but rather to find the correspondences that would render each Japanese sentence in English. Simi­ larly, in what follows, our task as we see it lies in translating one representation into another, and not in discussing the representations. For precisely this reason, a rigorous and explicit formulation of the represenations used becomes an abso­ lute necessity. (Note that this simile is for us much more than just a figure of speech. We really do believe that the functioning of human language consists in translating between different levels of utterance representations. For more on this subject see Mel'cuk 1978.) A linguistic representation, in our opinion, need not be a homogeneous object. Rather, our representations are sets of different formal objects, called structures, each of which is devoted to one particular aspect of the phenomenon represen­ ted. In this we also follow our general principle of strict separation of levels. 3. A static viewpoint Our syntactic description is intentionally static: we see our task only as formulating all the necessary correspondences between surface-syntactic and deep-morphological representations in English, and not as describing the proce­ dure(s) that could actually ensure the transition from one level to the other. The compiler of a bilingual dictionary lists all the correspondences between the words of the two languages, and no more; the algorithm for looking up a word and then using its equivalent lies outside his competence. In much the same way,

INTRODUCTION

7

we content ourselves with describing static correspondences — without consider­ ing the dynamic mechanisms needed for their implementation. This means, first of all, that no generation is involved — at any point of our exposition. Nothing is generated. Both representations we are working with (= the surface-syntactic and deep-morphological representations of sentences) are given as postulates in this book; their well-formedness should be ensured by for­ mal rules of the filter type (for more see p. 78ff.). Furthermore, there are no transformations involved. Nothing is actually transformed. Returning to the above comparison, in a Japanese-English dic­ tionary no Japanese expression is transformed into an English one. Rather, an appropriate English expression is chosen under the control of the Japanese input, which does not undergo any change. The same happens in our syntactic model: an appropriate deep-morphological configuration is chosen under the control of the surface-syntactic input, but the latter remains intact. (Among other things, this allows us to avoid creating complex mechanisms to preserve information about transformed items, such as the recent theory of traces in generative gram­ mar.) Finally, there is no ordering of rules. Each rule is written so as to include all that is necessary for its proper functioning — in explicit form. Since we do not consider the process of transition from one representation to another, we do not have to determine which rule should apply before or after which other rule. In this respect, our description resembles the most traditional ones. 4. Dependency trees Almost all of the familiar approaches to English syntax are couched in terms of constituency, or phrase-structure, systems. The elements making up the surface-syntactic structure are linearly ordered and grouped into higher-order units, which are considered to be non-terminal syntactic items. To indicate major syntactic roles, such as 'the subject of' or 'the object of', special phrase-structure configurations are used. This book, on the contrary, uses dependency systems as the only surface-syn­ tactic formalism. The elements in the surface-syntactic structure are not ordered linearly and no higher-order units are shown (thus there are no non-terminal items). Instead, the surface-syntactic elements, which are images of wordforms, are connected by binary directed relations of dependency so that not only the major, but all of the syntactic roles are indicated in a straightforward manner. Much more will be said about dependency systems in Chapter II, § 2, p. 48 ff.

8

SURFACE SYNTAX OF ENGLISH

5. Labeled surface-syntactic relations Perhaps the least familiar notion extensively used in this book is LABELED SURFACE-SYNTACTIC RELATION (SSyntRel). We consider SSyntRel's to be linguistic units, more or less like phonemes, or morphs, or values of gram­ matical categories (= grammemes). Forty different SSyntRel's are proposed for English, starting with certain well-known ones, such as the predicative or comp­ letive SSyntRel's, and including some new ones, such as the colligative or appositive-adverbial SSyntRel's; see the tentative list in § 4 of Chapter II. The notion of SSyntRel is introduced and discussed at some length in §§ 1—2 of Chapter II. Here it will suffice to say that SSyntRel's occupy a central place in our presentation. It can be said that the book as a whole answers only one question: How can a given English surface-syntactic relation be expressed at the deep-morphological level (i.e., by what deep-morphological string)? Or, if viewed from the opposite direction: Which surface-syntactic relations can be expressed by a given deep-morphological string (if it expresses some)? The nearest analogy to this approach from the domain of morphology would be as follows: to list, for each grammatical category of a language, all the surface expressions of all its values, along with all the conditions for the proper use of each individual expression. (Or vice versa: to list, for each morphological means, all grammatical values it can manifest in the given context.) For a successful reading of this book, it is vital that our reader fully under­ stand our most important message: (1) This book proposes to set forth the correspondences between the English surface-synItactic relations and the deep-morphological strings that implement them.

This is what the main thrust of this presentation is directed at. Everything else plays an auxiliary, even if important, role. However, statement (1) needs to be qualified. We fully understand the imperfection of our work. It is clear that many of the solutions we have proposed can turn out to be wrong and that incorrect assertions about English will ine­ vitably be found in this book. Therefore, we cannot (and do not) claim definitive truth for our present description. We agree in advance that our SSyntRel's are not introduced in the best possible way, and that the deep-morphological for­ mations that implement them are not presented quite ideally. But what we do claim is the status of a preferred method for our approach as a whole: ( 2 ) T h i s book proposes to show that the postulation of SSyntRel's and the description of their surface realizations is a very efficient and promising method of syntactic study.

INTRODUCTION

9

We will be happy if it is felt that we have succeeded in doing this with a reasonable degree of convincingness. Our only ambition, thus, is to pose the right problems and stake out the relevant gaps, which must be closed through further empirical studies. §3 Organization of this Book We start with a general survey of the Meaning-Text linguistic approach and an outline description of Meaning-Text models, putting special emphasis on three of their components: the semantic, deep-syntactic and surface-syntactic com­ ponents. All this material is covered in Chapter I, which is composed of four sec­ tions : § 1 - General Remarks. § 2 — Levels of Utterance Representation in the Meaning-Text Model. § 3 — General Design of the Meaning-Text Model. § 4 — Five Basic Principles of the Meaning-Text Approach. On the first reading, Chapter I can be skipped altogether or leafed through quick­ ly, to be returned to later, when theoretical problems arise in connection with the specific analyses proposed in the following chapters. The next two chapters are devoted to two major types of utterance repre­ sentation that, as indicated above, occupy a central position in our syntactic approach. Chapter II examines the surface-syntactic representation (SSyntR) of English sentences. The material is arranged in four sections: § 1 — General Characterization of the Surface-Syntactic Representation. Here, the composition of the SSyntR is specified. § 2 — Surface-Syntactic Structure. In this section, dependency formalism is compared to phrase-structure for­ malism, and the notion of syntactic dependency is developed. Surface-syntactic relations are introduced and commented upon. Some criteria for SSyntRels are stated. § 3 — Conditions for Grammatical Correctness of English Surface-Syntactic Structures. § 4 — Surface-Syntactic Relations in Modern English (a tentative list, with many examples). Chapter III describes the deep-morphological representation (DMorphR) of English sentences in a manner parallel to that adopted in Chapter II:

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SURFACE SYNTAX OF ENGLISH

§ 1 - General Characterization of the Deep-Morphological Representation. § 2 — Deep-Morphological Structure. § 3 — Conditions for Grammatical Correctness of English Deep-Morphological Structures. § 4 — Morphological Variables and Values of Wordforms in Modern English (a tentative list, with examples). When both representations are introduced, we proceed to the main part of the book: description of the correspondences between them. The component of the Meaning-Text model responsible for these correspondences is called the surface-syntactic component. This component, the focal point of our study, is dealt with in Chapter IV, divided into three sections: § 1 — General Characterization of the Surface-Syntactic Component. § 2 — The Notion of Syntagm. The notion of syntagm is defined and exemplified, which prepares the ground for the next section, the most important in the book: § 3 — Syntagms of Modern English. It can be said, without exaggeration, that the whole book has been written because of this section. The list of English syntagms is the core of the book and the main goal of our effort. Footnotes appear at the end of each section. Four appendices are added to the main body of the volume: Appendix I lists all the part-of-speech symbols and syntactic features used in the description. Appendix II shows standard subtrees appearing in the syntagms as variablės providing for more compact presentation. Appendix HI contains a list of lexemes mentioned in the syntagms. Appendix IV gives some 50 examples of English constructions not covered by our description. And a Subject and Term Index should help the reader to find his way through the text under the onslaught of so much new terminology. So much for the external, 'physical' organization of our study. As far as its internal or conceptual organization is concerned, it should be emphasized that it differs sharply from most American publications in the field. It is not our purpose to advance hypotheses, present systematic argumentation or make serious claims about English or about any linguistic universais. We simply state — from a logical viewpoint, very much as postulates — a surface-syntactic and a deep-morphological representation for English, and then formally describe pos-

INTRODUCTION

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sible correspondences between them. Arguments in favor of our proposals and solutions are given quite sporadically and do not play an important role. We focus on correspondences, as stated in (1) and (2), p. 8, adding a few comments and examples to facilitate the exposition. Now that our reader has been properly warned, we wish him a safe and inte­ resting expedition through the dependency forests of Meaning-Text syntactic land.

Chapter I A Brief Outline of the Meaning-Text Theory and the Corresponding Linguistic Model

§1 General Remarks The Meaning-Text Theory (henceforth, MTT) was put forward by Alexander K. Zholkovsky 1 and one of the present writers in 1965 (Zolkovskij and Mel'cuk 1965); two years later, a major presentation of the theory appeared (Zolkovskij and Mel'cuk 1967) and was soon translated into English and then into French. Shortly afterwards, Jurij D. Apresjan joined us, and thus was formed the nucleus of what was (partly as a joke) called the Moscow Semantic Circle. Over a ten-year period, some 20 people contributed to the work on a Meaning-Text Model of Rus­ sian. Basic general readings on MTT, in addition to the two titles just mentioned, include Mel'cuk 1970, 1973, 1974a, 1974b, 1978, 1981, Mel'cuk and Zolkovskij 1970, Apresjan 1974, 1980. A number of papers dealing with some more specific topics in syntax will be indicated in the main body of this book. Conceived and developed as a general theory of human language, MeaningText Theory is based on the following two postulates: POSTULATE 1. Every speech event presupposes exactly three main compo­ nents: — content, or pieces of information to be communicated, which are called meaning(s); — certain forms, or physical phenomena to be perceived, which are called text(s) — a many-to-many correspondence between an infinite set of meanings and an infinite set of texts, which constitutes language proper (or 'language in the narrow sense of the term'). This postulate can be diagrammed as follows: (1)

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