The Transformational-Generative Paradigm and Modern Linguistic Theory (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory)

THE TRANSFORMATIONAL-GENERATIVE PARADIGM

AMSTERDAM STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE

E. F. K. KOERNER, General Editor

Series IV - CURRENT ISSUES IN LINGUISTIC THEORY

Advisory Editorial Board Henning Andersen (Albany, N.Y.); Raimo Anttila (Los Angeles) Tomaz V. Gamkrelidze (Tiflis); Klaus J. Kohler (Kiel) J. Peter Maher (Hamburg);Ernst Pulgram (Ann Arbor, Mich.) E. Wyn Roberts (Vancouver, B.C.); Danny Steinberg (Honolulu)

Volume 1 E. F. K. Koerner, ed. The Transformational-Generative Paradigm and Modern Linguistic Theory

THE

TRANSFORMATIONAL-GENERATIVE PARADIGM AND

MODERN LINGUISTIC THEORY

edited by

E. F. K. KOERNER with the assistance of JOHN ODMARK and J. HOWARD SHAW

AMSTERDAM / JOHN BENJAMINS B.V. 1975

©

Copyright 1975 - John Benjamins B.V. ISBN 90 272 0901 4/90 272 0902 2

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.

FOREWORD This first volume of the "Current Trends in Linguistic Theory" (CILT) series reflects the fact that the possibilities in theory con­ struction allow for a much wider spectrum than students of linguistics have perhaps been led to believe. It consists of articles by scholars of differing generations and widely varying academic persuasions: some have received their initiation to the trade within the framework of transformational-generative grammar, some in one or the other struc­ turalist mould, yet others in the philology and linguistics of part­ icular languages and language families. They all share, however, some doubts concerning characteristic attitudes and procedures of presentday 'mainstream linguistics'. All want, not a uniformity of ideolog­ ical stance, but a union of individualists working towards the advance­ ment of theory and empirical accountability. In Spring 1973 J. Peter Maher and I first conceived the idea of a volume of the present nature; we regret that its publication has taken so long. Unfortunately, Professor Maher's introduction, originally in­ tended to appear in this volume, could not be included for technical reasons. Readers interested in seeing this introductory article are kindly referred to a forthcoming issue of Historiographia Linguistica. I would like to express my gratitude to the following people in addition to the contributors to this volume - for their assistance and patience: Mrs. Clara Rothmeier for typing the manuscript; Messrs. Howard Shaw and John Odmark for their advice on editorial matters and proofreading; Dr. Anne Betten for helping me with the index, and, last

VI

FOREWORD

but not least, Mr. J. L. Benjamins for his continued interest and finan­ cial support. A Portuguese translation of a number of articles included in the present volume under the editorship of Professor Marcelo Dascal of the University of Campinas, Brazil, is in preparation. Amsterdam, 5 March 1975

Technical

E. F. K. K.

Note: Because of the absence of a sign for the schwa in phonetic transcription in the italics element at hand, the following sign has been used to designate the e in citation forms: 3. Please note also that, on several occasions, the di­ acritic for length has been placed somewhat too far above the vowel in question, e.g., a, e, o, etc.

C O N T E N T S

Preface

v

I. SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS Dwight Bol inger: Meaning and Form: Some fallacies

of

asemantic

grammar

3

Adam Makkai: Stratificational Solutions to Unbridgeable Gaps in Transformational-Generative Grammar 37 Fred .  Peng: Non-Uniqueness in the Treatment of the Separabil­ ity of Semantics and Syntax in Compound Expressions 87 II. PHONOLOGY AND MORPHOLOGY Hsin-I Hsieh: How Generative is Phonology? ical surface forms in the lexicon) Michael Kenstowicz: Rule Application

(On listing

phonolog­ '109

in Pre-Generative

American

Phonology

145

Leonhard Lipka: Prolegomena to "Prolegomena Formation":, A reply to Morris Halle Royal Skousen:

to a Theory of Word175

On the Nature of Morphophonemic Alternation

Danny D. Steinberg and Robert K. Krohn: ity of Chomsky and Halle's Vowel Shift

The Psychological Rule

. . .185 Valid­ 233

III. LINGUISTIC THEORY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE Raimo Anttila: Generalization, guage

Abduction,

Evolution,

and

263

Bruce L. Derwing and Peter R. Harris: What is a Generative mar? Edward R. Maxwell: On the Inadequacy cept in Linguistic Analyses

Lan­

Gram­ 297

of the Tree as a Formal Con­ 315

VIII

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Wal burga von Raffi er Engel: Language Acquisition

and Common Sense 321

Uhlan V. Slagle: On the Nature of Language and Mind

329

IV. EPISTEMOLOGY AND HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS Lyle Campbell: Epistemologiaal Generative Paradigm

dilemmas and the

351

Dell Hymes: Pre-War Prague School pological Linguistics Esa Itkonen: ence

Transformational

Transformational-

and Post-War

American

Grammar and the Philosophy

Anthro­ 359 of

Sci­ 381

Biographical Notes

447

Index of Names

457

I. S Y N T A X

AND

SEMANTICS

MEANING AND FORM SOME FALLACIES OF ASEMANTIC GRAMMAR* DWIGHT BOLINGER

Every so often the scientific theorist finds it politic to climb down from the heights and appeal to common sense. Those of us who were parents in the 1930's well remember the theories of child-rearing that prevailed - asepsis was the ideal, the more untouched by human hands an infant was the better, and if some enterprising dealer in plastics could have found a way to wrap a fetus in cellophane it probably would have been done. Psychologists since then have well-nigh totally faced about, and a mother's love and kisses are again respectable as well as natural. Lin­ guistics has seen more than one such retreat from artifici­ ality. It was common sense that showed the mindlessness of twenty years ago, and that spurred the return to 'natural­ ness' a decade later. This little preamble is by way of saying that the the­ sis I am going to sustain is not one that would surprise the man on the street. Tell him that if two ways of saying something differ in their words or their arrangement they will also differ in meaning, and he will show as much sur­ prise as if you told him that walking in the rain is conduThis represents a lecture given 4 April 1973 at the New York Acad­ emy of Sciences and again, with modifications, at King's College, Aberdeen, Scotland, 24 April 1973.

4

DWIGHT BOLINGER

cive to getting wet. Only a scientist can wrap himself up in enough sophistication to keep dry under these circumstances. Here is how I mean to define my target. One of the prin­ ciples - I could almost say fetishes - of current formal lin­ guistics is the notion that underlying whatever communica­ tion one human being transmits to another is a deep structure in which every relationship relevant to meaning is set forth. The communication that gets transmitted is subject to all the accidents of transmission and is therefore a distortion of the bedrock structure. Among the possible distortions are actual bifurcations - two different ways of saying the same thing, two different surface structures, mapped on to a sin­ gle underlying structure by means of different transforma­ tions. For instance, it was claimed for a while that the to of the infinitive and the -ing of the gerund were merely al­ ternate complementizers and when you said Be likes to write and he enjoys writing any difference there was existed only between the verbs like and enjoy, not between to write and writing - the two main verbs merely selected different com­ plementizers. The difference between to write and writing became part of the automatism of language. The other side of the picture - two things the same in form but different in meaning rather than the same in mean­ ing but different in form - is better known because it ap­ peals more to our sense of the unusual. It is the basis of most puns, the funeral home that advertises a lay-away plan, the athletic girl who loves the sun and air (son and heir), and any number of more professional curiosities that have been invented, such as Chomsky's The shooting of the hunters was terrible. Obviously if the accidents that strike the surface can produce two different things stemming from the same deep structure, they can also produce two same things

MEANING AND FORM

5

stemming from different deep structures. I say little about this because there is little to be said. One can hardly ar­ gue the fact that many sentences starting with i t , for in­ stance, can be taken in more than one way - It's fun to eat differs depending on whether it refers to what is eaten or to the act of eating; and when Perry Mason says in an old movie I wonder if I wasn't expected to find out , you can take him as saying in effect, "Possibly I wasn't expected to" or "I'll bet I was expected to". It would be hard to quarrel with the doctrine of same­ ness and difference as an abstract scientific principle. The idea that things can be the same but different or different but the same is prerequisite to science - only by shutting our eyes to differences can we see that all legumes are a single family or that the gravitation of an apple hitting the earth is the same as that of a moon revolving about a planet. The problem is not in the principle but in the way linguists have sometimes interpreted it. I question whether any botanist would define his field so as to say that the variation among legumes has nothing to do with it; but lin­ guists have tended to define linguistics so as to say that variation in surface structures that have the same deep structure is irrelevant to the one thing that matters most in language, namely meaning. They have insisted on absolute identity with any difference defined out of the way. This attitude has been around a long time. It charac­ terized much of the work in phonology until very recently. In dealing with the sound system of a language it is use­ ful to think of an underlying system of contrastive units, phonemes or features, where a speaker, in two utterances of the same word, say, necessarily deviates within a certain range of tolerance without his hearer even being aware of

6

DWIGHT BOLINGER

it. Similarly one may find an identical system being used by another speaker, but with the physical traits of each sig­ nal differing slightly in ways that mark him as an individ­ ual or as the speaker of a different dialect, but with each unit still having the same communicative value as before. It is not too far-fetched to claim that cases like these are identical linguistically but different sociologically. The deviations can reasonably be defined out of the field. What happens when these notions of systemic identity and irrelevant difference are carried up the ladder into morphology and syntax? With morphology it still makes sense to think of the plurality of geese and the plurality of hens as the same entity despite the difference in ways for form­ ing the plural. Also, in describing the differences between speakers we would allow that if one say eethev and another says eyethev they are still using the same word; we know the origins of both and we can see the identity of usage. We may learn something of the speakers - their social group or their individual psychology - by observing the differences, but these can be ignored linguistically, in at least some contexts, since they do not affect the content of a commu­ nication. They may even be beyond the control of the speak­ ers. He does not manipulate them to ring changes on his mes­ sage. Where the mischief begins is in syntax. Differences in the arrangement of words and in the presence or absence of certain elements are assumed not to count. What is supposed to matter is the underlying deep structure, which is capa­ ble of producing, through transformations, divergent struc­ tures that mean exactly the same thing. The motive for as­ suming this is not only the search for simplicity, f or ways of stating rules or laws just once instead of again and

MEANING AND FORM

7

again, but also the yen that our modern linguist has for be­ ing a psychologist. If there is such a thing as a universal deep structure, it must reflect something about the human psyche,- and many conjectures have been made about the human infant springing from the womb with his noun phrases and relative clauses all ready to light up as soon as they are plugged into a particular language. Obviously the idea that even in syntax one could have identity within difference could not have gained currency without some empirical support. The classical case is that of the passive voice. If some differences of meaning are ignored, it is possible to say that John ate the spinach and The spinach was eaten by John are the same. They report the same event in the real world. The same entities are present and they are in the same relationship of actor and patient. But if truth value were the only criterion of iden­ tity in syntax we would have to say - as some have recently been trying to say - that John sold the house to Mary and Mary bought the house from John are just as much the same as the active-passive pair, and to seek some way of deriv­ ing them f a common base. Linguistic meaning covers a great deal more than reports of events in the real world. It expresses, sometimes in very obvious ways, other times in ways that are hard to ferret out, such things as what is the central part of the message as against the peripher­ al part, what our attitudes are toward the person we are speaking to, how we feel about the reliability of our mes­ sage, how we situate ourselves in the events we report, and many other things that make our messages not merely a rec­ ital of facts but a complex of facts and comments about facts and situations. If one wants to.believe, as I do, that in syntax there

8

DWIGHT BOLINGER

is no such thing as two different surface structures with the same deep structure (that is, with the same meaning), how does one come to grips with the idea? Nobody has counted how many of these imagined cases of identity exist, so if you vanquish one there is always another one waiting for you. The only answer I know is to find the cases that have the greatest inherent plausibility, and on which the strongest claims of identity have been staked, and to take them onone by one. A sampling of such a procedure is what I offer now. But before I start on that line let me say that this is not an indictment of transformational grammar any more than of traditional grammar, for both have made the assumption of identity. Transformationalists were not the ones who first pronounced the equivalence between active and passive or between attributive adjectives and reduced clauses. It is true, however, that transformational grammar may have the most at stake because of the firmly entrenched position that the idea occupies in the system. I start with what are for me the most difficult cases, where I am almost compelled to agree that there is no dif­ ference. Almost, but not quite. I refer to the ones that are 'caused by surface transformations1. I suspect that the rea­ son for virtual identity despite apparent difference is that transformations at this level are a linguistic reality and not a theoretical fiction. When a speaker echoes the ques­ tion Would you like to have some tea? with Yes, I would like to have some , or Yes, I would like to, or Yes, I would, in­ stead of Yes, I would like to have some tea, I believe that he would immediately understand if it were pointed out to him that his answer is an abbreviation - in fact, if one were to ask him Why didn't you say "Yes, I would like to have some tea"? I think he would reply by saying either But

MEANING AND FORM

9

that's what I said or Why should I say all that if I can say just part of it? The transformations involved are d e l e t i o n and pronominalization. As I s a i d , i t i s harder to find semantic d i f f e r e n c e s , and where one finds them they appear to be unpredictable from t h e i r inner s t r u c t u r e and dependent on some l a r g e r d i s ­ course r e l a t i o n s h i p , as i f an a c c i d e n t a l difference in form could only produce an a c c i d e n t a l difference in meaning. Some­ times a f a i r l y long sentence" i s open to a s e r i e s of trunca­ t i o n s among which any difference in meaning would be next to impossible to find. For example, in answer to the ques­ t i o n Who might have done it better than John might have done it? one can have the following: Joe might have done Joe might have done Joe might have done Joe might have done Joe might have done Joe might have done Joe might have. Joe might. Joe.«

it it it it it it

b e t t e r than b e t t e r than b e t t e r than b e t t e r than b e t t e r than better.

John might have done i t . John might have done. John might have. John might. John.

(The second of these is suspect; I am not sure that done is in the same function as in the original.) Of course there is a FUNCTIONAL difference here that those of us with an ear for intonation can quickly detect: all the answers use the same intonation curve, and when the answer is reduced to the monosyllable Joe it becomes a little awkward; the threeword answer Joe might have is about the lowest one can go in syllabic weight to accommodate the intonation comfort­ ably. To continue with the matter of intonation for a mo­ ment, one can see a clear functional difference in two re­

plies to the invitation Why don't

you go shopping

with me?

10

DWIGHT BOLINGER

One,

i s p o l i t e and w i s t f u l .

The o t h e r ,

want don't I to go shopping with you.

is unmistakably rude. If the full answer is used on the first intonation,

one is more strongly impelled to finish with but I can't, and the whole reply sounds a bit brusque. I believe that the effect of repeating the full sentence in a case like this is one either of mocking the original speaker or pretending that he is so dense that it is necessary to repeat all words to make him understand. Combining the mockery with the low terminal pitch, which is normal intonationally because with no new information there are no pitch rises, gives a scorn­ ful finality just right for repudiation. Of course, if what is repeated does not echo another person's actual words, one has unadulterated finality. Compare the wistful intonation of I

wish mine

were as

nice

Ma as 's. ry

MEANING AND FORM

11

with the finality of

I

have

to

, . work it

. every bit . Ma . mine . as nice so that will be as

. ry's is.

in which the addition of is is more appropriate. The effect of finality can be seen when complements are retained at the final low pitch: H needs money and he means to have money; You'll accept what I tell you to do and you'll do what I tell you to do. There are other effects that can be got by repetition besides the extra bulk for intonational purposes and the mocking echo. One is the ancient device of plurality. If I say She bought a ved dress, a green one, and a blue one, I give you a mere list of her purchases. But if I say She bought a red dress, she bought a green dress, and she bought a blue dress, you will infer that she bought excessively. One difference in form here comes from pronominalization, not deletion; but the two are the same in their main effects, namely in shortening and in not repeating the same words.1 Another effect is that of separation. This is found when the element to be removed is not deleted but pronominalized. If I say George came in the room and turned off the lights, ordinarily I would be taken to mean that George performed the actions in sequence, as two parts of a complex plan. But if I say George c in the room and he turned off the lights, it 'is probably either two separate events that are conjoined or two linked events conceptually separated (for example, his coming into the room is reported, but his turn­ ing off the lights is complained about). As in so many oth­ er places, the to of the infinitive behaves in this same way, much like a pronoun. The phrase the ability to read and write letters is more likely to be interpreted as 'a letter-

12

DWIGHT BOLINGER

reading-and-writing ability' than as 'a reading ability plus a letter-writing ability'. But if the to is retained, the ability

to read and to write

letters,

the probabilities

are reversed - the to helps to split read off from writeletters and sets it up as an intransitive verb. Still anoth­ er effect of repetition is admonitory, when used with some­ one's name, as in Mary wants to eat my soup hut Mary isn't going to get the chance. I suspect that this is a side ef­ fect of the repetition of a personal name as a kind of re­ proof. Except for the admonitory use, the effects of repeti­ tion mentioned thus far seem to be more or less systematic. That is, we regularly have the option of repeating some­ thing in full to get extra intonational weight, to suggest plurality, or to indicate that a conjunction applies to a whole sentence rather than part of one. But admonitory rep­ etition picks up a meaning through casual association - we repeat a person's name as a form of reproof in direct ad­ dress, and manage to carry a suggestion of it over into in­ direct address. There are other such casual associations in our repeating or not repeating an element of a sentence. At the time that Dwight Eisenhower was suffering from heart attacks, a cynical cartoon of Richard Nixon was published which pictured the two men standing at the foot of a stair­ way and Nixon saying to Eisenhower, Race you to the toy of the stairs. The omission of the subject I and the auxilia­ ry is common in such invitations. I suspect it comes by way of a blend with the imperative, which might also be used as an invitation in such a context, Race me to the top of the stairs.

In any case, Race you to the

top of the stairs

is

unambiguously an invitation; I'll race you to the top of the stairs is not. The regular deletion of the subject in

MEANING AND FORM

13

the imperative gives, by reversal, an admonitory effect similar to the one just mentioned in connection with proper names, when the subject you is included: You do as I say is stronger than Do as I say, and Come heve, you is stronger still than Come heve. (Of course when the you is a vocative it merely contrasts with some other you, for example You sit heve, Jane, and you sit heve, Mavy,) There are similar deletions in questions which have picked up special mean­ ings. If I am sampling a food and say to you Like a taste? you are apt to interpret my invitation as less ceremonious and hence more sincere than if I said Would you like a taste? It is obvious from these examples that deletions and pronominalizations may be specialized in function. An in­ stance of particular specialization is the use of answers with deleted main verbs as strong affirmations or denials. In answer to Do you claim that you weve theve on the night of August 22? one may say, naturally, just Yes, or Yes, I claim etc., but the answer I do is the most positive. The KINDS of differences in meaning that one finds with struc­ tures that differ only by deletion or pronominalization may not be the same, or may not be as striking, as those involv­ ing change of order or change of lexical material. But these contrasts are obviously being exploited and it is not too far-fetched to suppose that even here there is some poten­ tial difference in function whenever there is a difference in form. As I said, transformations at this level I believe are a linguistic reality. Speakers actually PERFORM, in some sense, the operations of deletion and pronominalization. Where transformations have been set up at supposedly deeper levels the claim of identity-despite-difference is easier to disprove. No better example could be found to start with

14

DWIGHT BOLINGER

than the passive voice with all its battle scars. Even the most ardent advocates of underlying identity have been obliged to retreat from their front-line position on this one, and concede that there is some kind of difference in emphasis, a way of highlighting certain elements so that ac­ tive and passive are not always interchangeable. If one asks the question What

did

John

do?

one hardly expects the an­

swer *The spinach was eaten by John. What did John do? is talking about John and the answer talks about the spinach. But there is more than this difference between active and passive, as I have found in working with prepositional verbs in English (Bolinger 1973a). Why is it that one can say both The dog walked under the bridge and Generations of lovers have walked under the bridge but The bridge has been walked under

by generations

of

lovers

strikes us as at least tol­

erable while *The bridge was walked under by the dog seems absurd? Or why is it that the passive of Nobody is to camp beside this lake, This lake is not to be camped beside by anybody! seems acceptable, but the passive of My sister camped beside the lake, *The lake was camped beside by my sister, is peculiar? After giving a set of examples like these to a class of seventy first-year college students, I found that when I had thrown out all the random responses there was a ten per cent consistent agreement on what the students felt was the reason for their willingness to ac­ cept a passive sentence with a prepositional verb - it had to represent something actually DONE TO something. What they were saying in effect was that the passive is marked for transitivity. The speaker has to be thinking of a patient that is somehow affected by the action. For generations of lovers to pass beneath a bridge makes it romantic. For a dog to walk under it is just that - you have a spatial re-

MEANING AND FORM

15

lationship between dog and bridge, and nothing more. If a rancher warns that his lake is not to be camped beside by anybody he obviously has in mind the potential damage to the lake. But for someone's sister to camp there merely tells where she is. A little investigating shows that simple verbs are subject to the same restriction. We can say George turned the pages or The pages were turned by George; some­ thing happens to the pages in the process. But while we can say George turned the corner we cannot say *The corner was turned by George - the corner is not affected, it is only where George was at the time. On the other hand, if one were speaking of some kind of marathon or race or a game in which a particular corner is thought of as' an objective to be taken, then one might say That

corner

hasn't

been

turned

yet, I can-say The stranger approached me or I was approached by the stranger because. I am thinking of how his approach may affect me - perhaps he is a panhandler. But if a train approaches me I do not say *J was

approached

by

the

train,

because all I am talking about is the geometry of two posi­ tions. There are also power relationships involved. Though we can say both Private Smith deserted the army and The gen­ erals deserted the army, to say that The army was deserted by Private Smith is comical while The army was deserted by all its generals is normal. This shows, I think, that passivization cannot be defined on a particular set of verbs. It demands access to the speaker's intentions, to the mean-. ing of whether or not an effect is produced. The passive depends on a very specific semantic feature, that of tran­ sitivity. Having disposed I hope of one old war horse that had already been put to pasture for other reasons, I turn to another that is a bit more skittish to deal with. So far

16

DWIGHT BOLINGER

as I know, there has never been any doubt in any grammari­ an's mind about the absolute equivalence between sentences having and sentences omitting the relative word that. My way of wording this prejudices the case somewhat - to say that the word that has been omitted implies that it was there in the first place, and accordingly some semantic trace of it may be left. We know historically that this is not true - sentences using that and sentences not using it have been around ever since English began to be English. The question is, does a sentence such as I noticed you were there

mean the same as one such as I noticed

that

you

weve

theve? For traditionalist and transformationalist alike, they have been regarded as in free variation. I will not go into the various restrictions on this supposed variation, which are a long story, more than just to say that there do exist environments where a that is required and others where a that is excluded (see Bolinger 1972). The most conspicu­ ous instance of required that is one serving as subject in its own clause, in the case of adjective clauses: *They ar­ rested the man shot the policeman requires an added that, but They arrested the man the policeman shot, where the that would be an object in its own clause, can do without it. That is the kind of restriction that can be stated nicely in transformational terms. The question is whether the process is merely one of introducing a that transforma­ tionally under set grammatical conditions, or one of mean­ ing from which the grammatical restrictions flow as corol­ laries. One way of helping to decide the question - it is too complex for me to say that it will thereby truly be decided - is to look for minimally distinct pairs, one mem­ ber of which contains a that while the other lacks it. The theory I am going on is that the word that is still - in

17

MEANING AND FORM

very subtle ways - the same word that it was when it first began to be used to head subordinate clauses, namely a demon­ strative. If we look at situations where speakers are volun­ teering information, where no question has been asked and no answer is implied, but what is being said comes out of the blue, it is unnatural for the word that to be used. If I step into a room and want to drop a casual remark about the weather I may say The forecast says it's going to rain. It would be odd for me to say *The forecast says that it is going to rain. But if you ask me What's the weather word for tomorrow? I have a choice; The forecast says that it is go­ ing to rain is normal. If we think of that in its fundamen­ tal deictic or anaphoric use as a demonstrative, we see that it is appropriate when the clause in question does not re­ present a disconnected fact but something tied in with a previous matter to which that can point back, just as it does in That man insulted me, meaning the man referred to before. If I see you at the side of the road struggling with a tire and feel charitable I may go over and say to you, by way of an opener, I thought you might need some help. To say I thought that you might need some help suggests a question already brought up - if you were a huffy sort of fellow and looked up at me as if wondering what business it was of mine, then I might shrug my shoulders and say by way of answer to the implied question, J just thought that you might need some help. Look at it another way. Suppose that clause is used without its subordinating verb - the distinction be­ tween old and new crops up again. Take an exchange like "I didn't know that." - "Know what?" - "That Jack's held down six jobs at the same time."

Try leaving off the that

in this case where a that

anaphora

18

DWIGHT BOLINGER

has already been introduced. On the other hand, suppose no that anaphora is present and the speaker is offering some­ thing new: "I want to tell you something." - "What?" - "Jack's held down six jobs at the same time." The use of that here is just as odd as its omission in the other case. You will notice that the main verbs I used, know and tell, are both verbs that are perfectly free to take a clause introduced by that, The other side of the problem of that and its omission is the supposedly suppletive relationship between that and the set comprising who, whose, and which. Just as that can be seen as basically demonstrative, so the other relatives can be seen as basically interrogative, and as lexemes in their own right, whose interrogative origin of course is a historical fact. The contrast between that and which shows up in a minimal pair such as the following: This letter stamps on *This letter stamps on

that came yesterday, that you remember had no it, was postmarked four weeks ago. that came yesterday, that incidentally had no it, was ...

The normal use of incidentally is to call a hearer's atten­ tion to a side topic which is new to the discourse. It is incompatible with anaphoric that, but quite compatible with a word that raises a new 'question1. We could if we wished use which in the first example, to refresh the hearer's memory, bringing the topic up anew; but there is hardly any choice in the second. The same contrast may be seen between that and who, for example in relation to intonation. In the example I want to get word to him as soon as possible about someone else that (who) I knew was available , the most com­ patible intonations are the following:

19

MEANING AND FORM else ... someone that I knew was available. ... someone

e 1 se

vail who I knew was a able.

In the first, availability is not at issue; it has been brought up before. In the second, the hearer is informed of it. The independent meaning of a that or a which is a tough point to get across because of its very subtlety and the in­ frequently with which using one or the other or neither is a matter of life and death. Unfortunately we have tended too often to see the importance of a question of language in terms of the importance of the message. The two are not re­ lated. Another element that has been viewed as a transforma­ tionally introduced particle is the pronoun it in a number of different constructions. Again it has been all schools of thought that have dealt thus cavalierly with this little word. Wallace Chafe (1970:101), for example, talking about sentences like It's

hot,

It's

late,

and It's

Tuesday,

says

that it "need not reflect anything at all in the semantic structure". In cases of extraposition, as for instance to err

is

human,

It's

human

to

err,

the it

has been regarded

as a pronominal copy of the displaced infinitive. But when we take an inclusive look at the various manifestations of it (Bolinger 1973), we find not only a great deal of seman­ tic similarity but also the possibility of combining usages which are supposedly distinct and independent. Arthur Schwartz (1972:70-71) sensed this whan he said that "the surface it [with infinitives etc.] is not really a pronomi-

20

DWIGHT BOLINGER

nal Substitute for the proposition, but closer to the imper­ sonal situation it heve".

of It

is

cold

today

or It

is

crowded

I maintain that Schwartz is right and that it

in

is the

same word throughout, with a reference system that is very loose and open, drawing its semantic specification from the context. When the caller on the talk show said It me that more

in

fun

things

the

early

'sixties

it

was more

fun,

seems

the it

to was

could just as easily have been expressed with

were

more

fun.

We are willing to accept things

as a

very general and inclusive term, and should do no less with it.

I mentioned combinations of supposedly different uses

of it

as one way of showing that the same it

Take a sentence like It's out

of

the

question

to

too

hot

to play

do anything

is involved.

tennis

else.

and

utterly

We slide over this

with perfect ease and only if we are prejudiced with a know­ ledge of grammar are we apt to realize that the first half, It's

too

hot

to play

tennis,

involves a weather expression,

while the second half, [It's] to

do anything

else,

asks you How is

it

It's

hard

to

study.

utterly

out

of

the

involves an extraposition. If someone in

your

room? you may readily answer

Try combining that question with the

other arrangement of the infinitive: "How is room?"

-

"'To study

question

is

hard. " The it

of It's

it

in

hard

your

to

study

has to be more than a pronominal copy of the infinitive it is the same situational it IT in hard

your to

as in the question, How is

room? Again we can combine them: It's

study.

If the it

noisy

and

were two different words, this

ought to give the impression of a zeugma, like saying *I have that,

to

brush

my teeth

and hair.

like

is a word with a meaning in its own right, and two

such constructions as It tennis

I believe that i t ,

is

fun

is

fun

playing

tennis

and

Playing

do not mean quite the same, even though in

MEANING AND FORM

21

many and perhaps most situations we could manage with either one. I have already mentioned my next example. Up to six or seven years ago it was generally held in transformational circles that the infinitive and the gerund are selected as complements by particular verbs in a kind of blind automatic process that has nothing to do with separate meanings for those two forms. That notion has now been given up, but like other old articles of faith it dies hard, and one indirect manifestation of it is still lurking around. I refer to the idea that there need not be any feature present in the verbs that take infinitive complements that causes them to do so, and similarly with the verbs that take gerunds (Dingwall 1971; cf. Bolinger 1974b). In other words, the association of verb with infinitive or gerund is still arbitrary. Proof of this is supposed to be found in the fact that there are pairs of synonyms one member of which takes infinitive com­ plements. An example of such a pair is refuse and spurn. Since there seems to be no relevant difference in meaning between them, the choice of different complements must be arbitrary, so the reasoning goes: He *He He ?He

refused spurned spurned refused

to to my my

accept the job. accept the job. helping him. helping him.

The problem here is to show that the minimal pair He refused to accept the job and *He spurned to accept the job once more embodies a difference in meaning, only now the differ­ ence produces an anomaly in one of the sentences. More pre­ cisely, there is something about the meaning of the verb spurn that is incompatible with the meaning of the infini­ tive. Suppose we try to get a fix on spurn and refuse by

22

DWIGHT BOLINGER

looking at some of the other complements that go with them. We can say He refused the offer, He refused the invitation . . . bid, advice. We cannot say *He refused the idea, He re­ fused the solution, He refused the truth - but with spurn these are all right. We can say After having it on trial he refused it, but we cannot say *After owning it for years he refused i t . Again, spurn is all right. There is obviously something about the meaning of refuse that faces somehow in a different direction from that of spurn. I hypothesize that it is a feature (if you like to call such things features) that might be called 'future orientation'. One can refuse an offer, and accordingly refuse a gift, a car, a dog, or even an idea if it is thought of as something offered. But one may not refuse something that one already possesses. The feature of future orientation fits the meaning of the infin­ itive, which as a number of people have pointed out is some­ thing on the order of 'hypotheticalness'. There are other pairs like refuse and spurn that show this same contrast of orientation. Take remember and recall. They are synonyms in sentences like I remembered my adventure and I recalled my adventure ; but whereas Remember to phone me is normal, *Re­ call to phone me is not. Remember, like refuse, embodies that future orientation. It brings things AHEAD OF one's mind, not back of it. If I say At that moment I remembered my wife, remember suggests something to be done. But in At that mo­ ment I recalled my wife all we have is a backward look. The companion pair of remember-recall is forget-overlook: He forgot his sister when he went tells us that an action he was supposed to carry out in the future was left undone. He overlooked his sister when he went merely tells us that she failed to get his attention. The picture of language as an automaton in which you punch the button reading refuse

MEANING AND FORM

23

and an infinitive pops into the slot is false to the facts. The infinitive has a meaning and refuse has a compatible meaning. There is nothing more mysterious about the harmony between refuse and the infinitive than there is between to drink

and

coffee.

Let me give now a case of supposed free variation, that of our two sets of indefinite pronouns (cf. Bolinger 1974c). Someone,

anyone,

somebody,

no one, and everyone

anybody,

nobody,

and everybody

belong to one set; belong to the other.

Here we have to take on all the authors of the handbooks, including Jespersen, who could see no difference in meaning between them. My including them among my examples is the result of a friendly challenge. A colleague who knew my po­ sition in general about difference in form requiring differ­ ence in meaning dared me to find a difference here, and I tried to oblige. First I gave a pair of contrasting situa­ tions to a group of thirteen graduate students who were told to choose somebody or someone according to which seemed to fit the meaning best. The first situation read like this: "Who's the present for?" I asked. "Somebody He gave me an intimate look. very special, very dear to me," he said. Of course it had to be me, but I concealed my blushes. The second situation read like this: "Who's the present for?" I asked. _ Oh, somebody" someone , he said, like meaning it was none of my business. "You don't know him. Her. Them." The vote was unanimous, with someone for the first and some­ body for the second. Knowing what we know about pronouns it should not surprise us that meanings having to do with dis­ tance, intimacy, and the relationships between the speaker

24

DWIGHT BOLINGER

and others should be built into them, and that appears to be what has happened with the indefinites. My hypothesis about one is that it is marked for nearness, in both a spatial and a psychological sense. I gave a more elaborate test later to another group and asked them to comment on their own reac­ tions. Several did so, and the gist of the answers conformed to the hypothesis that I had set up. As one worded it, "[-one] intimacy, definiteness, individuality; [-body] distance, in­ definite reference, collectivity". Allow me to point out here - as bearing on something to be elaborated on in a mo­ ment - the fact that the one of the indefinite compounds someone_, anyone, etc. has unmistakable ties to the word one as an independent indefinite pronoun, as in What can one say? I mentioned earlier another transformation about which grammarians have had second thoughts, the one that was sup­ posed to yield attributive adjectives. The classical form of this derives a noun phrase such as an empty house from the same underlying source as a house that's empty. It has been clear for some time that the relationship between these two structures is not as obvious as it once appeared. In fact, the supposed deep structure actually gives us less information than the surface structure ; you can see this by the behavior of a great many adjectives. Take one such as l o o s e . I may say The dog is loose, meaning that he is not tied up. I can say Where

is

the

dog

that's

loose?

but I am

not apt to say *Where is the loose dog? On the other hand I can say A loose dog is apt to be a danger to the neighbor­ hood.

Or take an adjective such as handy.

The

tools

are

handy is ambiguous - it may mean tools that are made in such a way that they are very useful, or it may mean just that the tools happen to be easy to reach. But if we say the handy tools we select just one of these meanings, the one

MEANING AND FORM

25

that refers to how the tools are made, the way they really are. An adjective that is placed before the noun is not just any adjective that can occur after the verb be , but is one that can be used to do more than describe a temporary state it has to be able to characterize the noun. *Where is the loose dog? is an unlikely sentence because it refers to a temporary state. A loose dog is apt to be a danger to the neighborhood is normal because we are making a generaliza­ tion in which it is necessary to characterize certain dogs AS IF they formed a class. We can say the people asleep but not *the asleep people because we are not characterizing them, only telling how they are at the moment. But when the adjective aware began to be used as a synonym of alert , it was able to move before the noun: He's a very aware peron. An adjective that can only refer to a temporary state has to follow the noun: money galore. Even if we play with the deep structure so as to set up more than one source for these ob­ vious differences, it still does not follow that an empty house means the same as a house that1 s empty. Sometimes they are interchangeable, but other times they are not, for the simple reason that the explicit predication in one makes a difference in the way the information is presented to the hearer. I could go on with more examples in detail but it would only be repeating the same story. There is the so-called particle movement transformation, by which a structure such as haul in the lines is supposed to yield haul the lines in. But these do not mean the same, as can be seen by comparing the compatibility of saying They hauled in the lines but really

didn't

get

them

in

with the contradictoriness of say­

ing *They hauled the lines in hut really didn't get them in. One transformationalist skeptic refused to accept this nau-

26

DWIGHT BOLINGER

tical pair as evidence of a contrast, but John Beatty re­ ports (personal communication) that he has asked sailors about the two sentences and "they all hold that there is a difference, which deals with completive action. They in

the

hauled

lines the

but lines

didn't

get

in

didn't

but

them in get

hauled *They

is possible, but them

in

is not." A good

example of how a theory can get in the way of reality. There is the pseudo-passive, concerning which it has been claimed (cf. Mihailovic 1967) that there is no difference in mean­ ing from the active, for example Be accidentally the

river

and He was accidentally

drowned

in

drowned the

in

river.

Yet

even without an agent expressed or implied there is a dif­ ference. If we say Re stupidly

drowned

we view him as an

actor in the causal chain, even though he may not have been a willing or even a conscious one - we can add He drowned;

why couldn't

He was stupidly ful? fenced venture

he have

drowned;

been

why couldn't

more

careful?

he have

is odd - we are more apt to say why couldn't off out?

the

safe

area

so he could

have

told

stupidly

But to say been

more they

how far

care­ have to

The pseudo-passive, like the real passive, puts

the responsibility on other shoulders than those of the vic­ tim. To get the other side of the picture I want to turn now to cases where it has been claimed that there IS a dif­ ference but there really is none, and the supposed differ­ ence turns out to have been created in the linguist's mind through a confusion of competence and performance. It is essential to look at this side because actually it has of­ ten been the failure to see a sameness at one level that has led to the failure to see a difference at another. I shall give just one new example to make this point and then double back ver a couple of previous ones to show

MEANING AND FORM

27

that they illustrate the same thing. My new example is with the imperative using the auxiliary verb do (see Bolinger 1974d). The claim has been made that do is a dependable test for true imperatives (Schreiber 1972), since it is never used except with actions that can really be commanded: Do be careful, Do try harder, but not *Do be glad, *Do own the property. If this is true, then the function of do in such constructions must not be the same as that of the ordinary do that we find in negative and affirmative sentences, where it is normal to say He did own the property or He didn't own the property. In other words, either we have two homonyms, both spelled do, or somehow the single word do has to be tagged twice in the dictionary. But when we look at the sit­ uation in which do imperatives are used, we find that do is still the same old word after all. Imagine that someone knocks at your house and you throw open the door and in the very act of opening it you greet him with Do come in! People I have asked about this find such an ungrounded use of do unnatural - they can imagine throwing the door open and im­ mediately saying Come in , but not Do come in. Do come in re­ quires an interval, however short, of the person's standing there and NOT coming in. The do that is added is the same affirmative do that contradicts other negatives: "He didn't do it." - "Yes he did!" The test of course is whether we can falsify the other claim about do being normal only with actions that can truly be commanded. A counter-example is a sentence such as I don't care whether you are successful or not, but do be happy; that's the most important thing in life. One cannot be happy by an act of will; but do in this sentence is normal because it is built on a prior negation.2 I have said that the mistake in a case like this is due to a confusion of competence with performance. The com-

28

DWIGHT BOLINGER

petence consists in the meaning of the word do that we carry in our heads. It is a constant, relating to the concept of affirmation. The performance resides in the chance associa­ tion of do with imperatives on the one hand and declaratives on the other. Since imperatives and declaratives are dif­ ferent, when do intersects with them one gets a different impression, and reads that difference into the word do, like concluding that Joe Smith is a different person when you meet him on a dark night. If we look back at two of the ear­ lier examples I gave we find the same thing happening. The word it is a lexical constant which shows up in association both with situational expressions such as those having to do with weather and with extrapositions. In order to get a syn­ tactical sameness such as the supposed one between To study is hard and It 's hard to study we have to ignore the reality of i t . To achieve a false sameness we have to create a false difference. The other case was the demonstrative that - it is a lexical constant which has been adopted into the scheme of relative clauses while still retaining its demonstrative meaning. It would probably be going too far to claim that all particles which are supposedly just the product of transformations are really words in their own right which belong in the lexicon as much as in the grammar; but at least enough has been said to make one want to take a second look at most of them. Such things as the to of the infinitive, the be of the passive, and the there of there was deserve to be restudied for what they may contain as independent words. Returning to my main thesis of difference in form nec­ essarily correlating with difference in meaning, I would say that here again there has been a confusion of competence and performance, exactly the reverse of the kind that has

MEANING AND FORM

29

been claimed by many transformationalists. Instead of there being an underlying sameness in active and passive with the differences being relegated to style, focus, or what-not, I would say that there is an underlying difference with the samenesses being due to performance variables. If you are asked What happened to the train? and you answer It was wrecked by the engineer3 you could just as well have answered The engineer wrecked it. There is nothing in the performance situation that cannot be satisfied by one answer as well as by the other. But if you are asked Who was responsible? you are going to prefer the passive voice. The fact that a con­ trast that we carry in our competence is relevant does not mean that it is relevant all the time. It only means that it is there when we need it. Here I put in my word again for common sense. If a language permits a contrast to sur­ vive, it ought to be for a purpose. When we look at what has happened historically to the accidental contrasts that have cropped up, at the avidity with which speakers seize upon them to squeeze in a difference of meaning, come what may, I think we can form a proper appreciation of linguistic econ­ omy. It is'not normal for a language to waste its resources. If what I think is true of the cases I have cited turns out to be true generally and there really are no syntactic differences that are of no consequence semantically, we will have to expect some changes in our ideas about surface struc­ ture and deep structure. It will not necessarily affect sur­ face identities that are correlated with deep differences. This after all is commonplace in the lexicon, where homonyms are plentiful. But there will no longer be surface differ­ ences correlated with absolute identities in deep structure. Instead of claiming that structures ARE the same, we will be looking for the samenesses that they CONTAIN, and on top of

30

DWIGHT BOLINGER

that trying to identify and define the elements that make them different. Many transformations will be affected, and some will have to be abandoned. I cannot see, for example, how the particle movement transformation can possibly hold up, since the difference in meaning stems from a change in the constituents of the sentence. The example I used was

They hauled

in the

lines

and They hauled

the first member of the pair in

the

lines

in.

In

is a constituent of the verb.

In the second it is at least partially a constituent of lines

- the lines were in; that is why it is contradictory

to say *They hauled in.

the

Or take the some-any

lines

in but

really

didn,t

get

them

rule, which Robin Lakoff (1969) and

William Labov (1972) have done a thorough job of debunking. Any other rule that treats a lexical difference in such an offhand manner will have to go the same route. While I am suggesting that there will have to be changes in our view of underlying structure or underlying paraphrase, I am not suggesting that we give it up. The things that peo­ ple say are too often a kind of shorthand, and if we are to interpret it we have to elaborate on it. But I do not be­ lieve that we can always hope to do this in the chiseled manner that deep structure analysis has demanded. For one thing I believe that many surface structures are not trace­ able to single underlying structures or neat embeddings of one kind or another, but have to be viewed as syntactic blends. For another I find the relationships at times too subtle or too general to be built on the actual structures that they supposedly reflect. An example of this sort that came my way recently was an odd fact (reported in Schlach­ ter 1973:31-34) that Michael Brame noted regarding idioms, which is

that

they may be broken up if one of the broken

halves is retained in a relative clause. For instance, we

MEANING AND FORM

31

do not say *The lip service displeased me , but we can say The lip service that they paid displeased me. The question that must be asked is whether idioms and relative clauses are relevant per se. Are there other ways of fleshing out an idiom besides providing its missing half? Take pay lip ser­ vice again: *Lip *The The The

service is unsatisfactory. lip service is unsatisfactory. lip service that they paid was unsatisfactory. lip service that was all they they expected would not have been enough for me. Lip service alone is not satisfactory. That sort of lip service would never satisfy me.

Not only can the sentence get along without the rest of the idiom, it can get along without the clause. Now take an ex­ pression that does not involve an idiom: *The folly displeased me. The folly that he was guilty of displeased me. Such folly displeased me. Folly always dispeased me.

A relative clause improves things, though there is no col­ location, such as pay with lip service, that has any spe­ cial claim on f o l l y ; but other devices effect the same im­ provement. Either the situation with idioms and relative clauses is one of many superficially similar situations each of which requires a different analysis, or all such cases are fundamentally the same though in a rough and ready way that does not answer to one coherent syntactic treatment. I would embrace the second alternative and say that the ex­ planation lies in a condition normally imposed on discourse, which is that a speaker will not introduce a noun phrase un­ less he can assume that its referent is within the grasp of his hearer. One typical place where this breaks down is in

32

DWIGHT BOLINGER

the speech of children when they address adults. A little seen

Doro­

thy?

girl approaciies a stranger and inquires Have

The appropriate rejoinder for an adult is Who is

Doro­

thy?

If someone says I left

overpowering

the

you

room because

the

stench

was

we have no difficulty putting two and two to­

gether and inferring that there was a stench in the room.

But on hearing *I left powering

the

room because

we can only ask What

disgust?

the

disgust

was

over­

The speaker has vio­

lated a canon of discourse by giving us no way to discover a referent for the noun. Had he said the

disgust

that

I

felt

there would have been no problem. Idioms are perhaps special because in addition to the lack of any referent, the noun phrase may be meaningless if we fail to provide the rest to the idiom somewhere nearby. A relative clause is no way. Prior context is another, as in *Tabs on everybody is 1984ish. Kissinger can keep tabs on his friends, but tabs on everybody is pretty 1984ish, isn't it? Or instead of being meaningless the imcomplete idiom may convey the wrong meaning, as happens with take

contrast with take

offense

by

umbrage:

'«The umbrage was understandable. *The offense was understandable.† The umbrage (offense) that they took was understandable. Their umbrage was understandable. *Their offense was understandable.† The last example, if it means anything, refers to people who are aggressors rather than victims. Just as idioms are a special case, so are degree words used epithetically. My example *The wrong because folly

folly

displeased

me is

is like an adjective: it is used only

f Starred in the relevant sense.

MEANING AND FORM

33

to describe a noun, and the hearer is given no clue as to whether there is anything in the situation that is being described as foolish. The folly of it displeased me provides the missing element. (Ordinarily a concrete noun will be taken to imply "There is such an entity in the situation" and cause no trouble: The comedy displeased me.) A more ob­ vious example of an epithet is bastard: *As I walked out the front door the bastard came toward me. As I walked out the front door the bastard who had insulted me came toward me. Jones was standing out there, and as I walked out the front door the bastard came toward me.

The first example is unacceptable because there is no clue to anybody who is being called a bastard. You can see how easy it is, comparatively speaking, to explain a discourse constraint of this kind using ordinary language, and how difficult it would be to put it in pre­ cise syntactic terms short of simply listing all the syn­ tactic resources whereby a speaker can make known that a noun phrase has a referent and what the referent is . More is inferential than syntactic. Yet the syntacticist will determinedly seize upon one incidental - and as it turns out only occasional - feature of a broad phenomenon such as this to use it in a derivational scheme for relative clauses. At best, this approach shows a failure to see things in the whole before trying to analyze the parts. There are times to garble somewhat Einar Haugen's (1972:312) allegory of the Procrusteans and the Heracleans - when the best proce­ dure is not to tease the data but to wade in on all fours. I can sympathize with those who try to do more, and still be happy to have chosen a topic that exempts me from it, and allows me to end my discourse by proclaiming that God's in his heaven and when we say two things that are different we mean two different things by them.

34

DWIGHT BOLINGER

NOTES

1

In other respects as well. Certain quantifier pronouns are the same as quantifier adjectives, and appear to be the result of deletion, e.g., He has

some money

reduced to He has

some.

The syntax of the to

of the

infinitive, when the lexical infinitive itself is dropped, is quite sim­ ilar to that of the personal pronouns, e.g., I hated IT but I had TO. 2 The sentence *Do b happy unless you have a real reason for feeling sad has been proposed as a counter-example to the theory that do with imperative is based on a prior negation. This assumes that unless is negative, but as Michael Geis (1973) demonstrates, unless is positive, as can be seen using some and any:

If you don't have any objection, I'11 wait. *Unless you have any objection, I'll wait. Unless you have some objection, I'll wait. When if

not

replaces unless,

do b happy

becomes acceptable: If

you

have a real reason for feeling sad, then do  happy. Geis deals effectively with another case of false identity. Unless and if not are not the same in meaning.

don't

REFERENCES Bolinger, Dwight. 1972. That's ____ tics

. 1973. "Ambient It

That.

The Hague: Mouton.

Is Meaningful Too". Journal

of

Unguis-

9.261-70.

. 1974a. "Transitivity and Spatiality: The passive of the prepositional verbs". Linguistics at the Crossroads ed. by Adam Makkai. The Hague: Mouton, in press. . 1974b. "A Semantic View of Syntax: Some verbs that govern infinitives". Festschrift for Archibald A. Hill ed. by Edgar C. Po­ lome, Werner Winter, and Mohammad A. Jazayery, inpress . The Hague: Mouton.

35

MEANING AND FORM

Bolinger, Dwight. 1974c. "The In-Group: One and its compounds". Current ed. by Paolo Valesio. The Hague: Mouton, in Trends in Stylistics press. . 1974d. "Do Imperatives". Journal of English Linguistics 8.1-5 (March 1974). Chafe, Wallace L. 1970. Meaning and the Structure Univ. of Chicago Press.

of Language.

Chicago:

Dingwall, William Orr. 1971. "On So-called Anaphoric To and the Theory of Anaphora in General". Journal of English Linguistics 5.49-77. Geis, Michael L. 1973. "If and Unless". Issues in Linguistics: Papers in honor of Henry and Renée Kahane ed. by Braj B. Kachru, Robert B. Lees, et al.., 231-53. Urbana, I11.: Univ. of Illinois Press. Haugen, Einar. 1972. The Ecology ford Univ. Press.

of Language.

Stanford, Calif.: Stan­

Labov, William. 1972. "Negative Attraction and Negative Concord in En­ glish Grammar". Language 48.773-818. Lakoff, Robin. 1969. "Some Reasons Why There Can't Be Any Some-Any Rule". Language 45.608-15. Mihailovic, Ljiljana. 1967. "Passive and Pseudo-passive Verbal Groups in English". English Studies 48.316-26. Schachter, Paul. 1973. "Focus and Relativization". Language 49.19-46. Schreiber, Peter A. 1972. "Style Disjuncts and the Performative Analy­ sis". Linguistic Inquiry 3.321-47. Schwartz, Arthur. 1972. "Constraints on Movement Transformations". Journal of Linguistics 8.35-85.

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS TO UNBRIDGEABLE GAPS IN THE TRANSFORMATIONAL-GENERATIVE PARADIGM TRANSLATION,

IDIOMATICITY,

ADAM

AND MULTIPLE CODING

MAKKAI

0.0. The present paper surveys some areas of recent linguistic theory that have proven the Chomskyan paradigm (and its various notational vari­ ants) to be unworkable, if by a 'working grammatical theory' we mean a theory that squarely faces the task of informing us of what people actu­ ally do. Hence the main argument of this paper will be that the Chomskyan distinction between 'competence' and 'performance' must be understood in the light of the pragmatics and the ecology of human interaction in a non-imaginary society. My solutions are suggested within the framework of Stratificational-Cognitive Grammar (henceforth SG) and Pragmo-Ecological Grammar (PEG), my own approach within the family of stratificational grammars. The areas covered here will be (1) translation, (2) deep struc­ ture, (3) idioms and, finally, (4) multiple coding in speech. 1.0. It is by now more than intuition that tells us that TG cannot han­ dle translation in any systematic, -ad hoc manner. It is a moot point whether transformationalists have dealt with the problem, for the reply could always be made that the problem simply did not occupy their atten­ tion. My point here is that is a L O G I C A L I M P O S S I B I L I T Y to achieve any sort of adequate translation from L1 to L 2 under TG assumption, whether

38

ADAM MAKKAI

one espouses the Chomsky-Katz-Jackendoff 'lexicalist-interpretivist' po­ sition, or the McCawley-Lakoff-Ross 'generative semantics' position. It will be shown that, if TG is to work at all, one would have to practice both the semantics-centered versions of TG and the syntax-centered ones which, according to Emmon Bach (1971), has been proven to be impossible. Essentially Bach says that according to advanced mathematical testing by Stanley Peters and R.W. Ritchie the lexicalist-interpretivist and the generative semantics positions are logically incompatible. The question arises whether or not 'mathematical testing' is relevant for evaluating human grammars, and whether competence and performance are indeed two truly separate sides of the coin of human speech. For linguists in the TG and PEG traditions, competence and performance coincide in many areas. The stratificationalist David G. Lockwood, for instance, speaks about 'ideal performance' in his Introduction

to Stratiƒicational

Linguistics

(1972). 1.1.

In what follows, I will describe the various TG positions AS IF

THEY ATTEMPTED TO DESCRIBE WHAT HUMAN BEINGS REALLY DO. That the TG-

oriented reader will cry 'this is not cricket' is to be expected. My re­ ply to such a defense is: A L I N G U I S T I C T H E O R Y O U G H T T O B E A B O U T W H A T HUMAN BEINGS DO, AND IF IT IS NOT, IT IS NOT A VIABLE, SERIOUS LINGUISTIC

U M E R E L Y AN I N T E L L E C T U A L G A M E . Intellectual games, as all games, subdivide into (a) harmless, entertaining games, (b) challenging, sporting games, designed to strengthen the mind and the body, and (c) crooked games, designed to get the better of a socially or emotionally inferior victim by an aggressor. (For a theory of games from the emotion­ al point of view, see Eric Berne's popular psychological study of 1966, Games people Play). It is my contention that viewed as a game, TG exhib­ its all three of these characteristics. In so far as it is harmlessly entertaining and challenging, there is nothing one could object to. Alas, it also exhibits the characteristics of crooked games and as such has caused the profession of linguistics as well as individuals actual harm. Aspects of this will be documented and discussed below. THEORY,

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS 1.2.

In his forthcoming book, Introduction

39

to Human L i n g u i s t i c s , Victor

H. Yngve of the University of Chicago, recalling his conversations with Chomsky at M.I.T. writes: The freeing of linguistic data from personal bias is far from a triv­ ial point, for it is all too easy to be led astray. One of the most serious problems with Chomsky's early (1957) monograph was an inade­ quate treatment of the relation between theory and observation in science. In that study we find recurrent discussions of this issue, for example: "One function of this theory is to provide a general method for selecting a grammar for each language, given a corpus of sentences in that language" (p. 11). "Clearly, every grammar will have to meet certain external conditions of adequacy; e.g., the sen­ tences generated will have to be acceptable to the native speaker" (pp.49-50). Yet these were not the strictures actually employed in that monograph: "One way to test the adequacy of a grammar proposed for L is to determine whether or not the sentences that it generates are actually grammatical, i.e., acceptable to a native speaker, etc. We can take certain steps toward providing a behavioral criterion for grammaticalness so that this test of adequacy can be carried out. For the purposes of this discussion, however, suppose that we assume intuitive knowledge of the grammatical sentences of English and ask what sort of grammar will be able to do the job of producing these in some effective and illuminating way. We thus face a familiar task of explication of some intuitive concept, in this case the concept of 'grammatical in English', and more generally, the concept of 'grammatical'" (p.13). Now the task of explication has its place, but it brings the danger of mistaking the intuitive concept either for solid data or for some self-evident theory that somehow need not be tested against data (emphasis added, A.M.). There is the further danger that the author's "intuitive knowledge of the grammatical sentences of En­ glish" may be biased by his theoretical preconceptions in such a way as to bolster his arguments at the expense of scientific truth (em­ phasis added, A.M.). Let's see what Chomsky is led to do when what his intuition would include as 'grammatical in English' differs from what is acceptable to a native speaker. The whole point of that monograph was to argue the merits of the author's transformational approach to granimar, with the author taking a strong point of advocacy. In the course of the arguments, certain simple processes of sentence formation are postulated and accepted intuitively as characteristic of English (p.21). These processes in­ volve the embedding of sentences in other sentences, and would gene­ rate such strings as "If either the man who said that if either the woman who reported that it is raining, is wrong, or the boy rode his bicycle, then I will be happy, is arriving today, or you are sad, then Bill was right." The further course of the argument hinges on

40

ADAM MAKKAI whether strings such as these are grammatical English sentences or not. Now it would seem that any realistic criterion of 'external adequacy' would reject such strings as not being acceptable to the native speaker. This is particularly true in light of the fact that Chomsky intends no limit to the recursive processes used, so that much more complex examples would also be produced. BUT THEN HE COULD NOT GO ON TO 'PROVE' THAT 'ENGLISH IS NOT A FINITE STATE LAN­ GUAGE' AND HIS ARGUMENT IN FAVOR OF TRANSFORMATIONS WOULD CRUMBLE (special emphasis added, A.M.). Faced with a discrepancy between observed facts and the pre­ dictions of theory, one would expect a revision of theory: "We shall continue to revise our notions of simplicity and character­ ization of the form of grammars until the grammars selected by the theory do meet the external conditions" (p.54). But we find instead an argument for keeping the theory and re­ moving the discrepancy by actually accepting such sentences as grammatical: "Note that many of the sentences of the form (... of the one cited above) will be quite strange and unusual" (they can be made less strange by replacing 'if' by 'whenever', 'on the as­ sumption that', 'if it is the case that', etc., without changing the substance of our remarks). BUT THEY ARE ALL GRAMMATICAL SEN­ TENCES, formed by processes of sentence construction so simple and elementary that even the most rudimentary English grammar would contain them. They can be understood, and we can even state quite forth­ simply the conditions under which they can be true. (Yngve coming, pp.16-18, quoted from a privately-circulated manuscript, by permission of the author.)

In the rest of the chapter Yngve recalls how Chomsky was immediately and widely criticized for this contradiction. Having been at M.I.T. at the time, and having engaged Chomsky personally in conversation about these matters, Yngve recalls the birth of the forced distinction between 'competence' and 'performance'. Chomsky's answer was that for a sen­ tence to be grammatical in English, it can meet adequacy

conditions in

the competence which it does not necessarily meet in performance. Be­ tween competence and performance, competence is the more important one; it is, in fact, the basis of the description of the language. In this manner, then, Chomsky may have patched up the most glaring contradiction of his theory by creating (for his purposes) an unbridge­ able gap between competence and performance. So far it would have been merely an entertaining or a challenging game, but alas, in its later stages the game also became a crooked one. Whenever a critic of the

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS

41

'Chomskyan paradigm' pointed out an irreconcilable contradiction between fact and theory, Chomsky and his disciples intoned: "You are not inter­ ested in real linguistics ... You are talking about matters of performance Real linguistics is the description of competence in terms of transfor­ mations and symbolic logic". By using this form of rhetoric, the MIT-es­ tablishment accomplished several things at once: (a) They explained away the contradictions found by the critics; (b) they projected an image of progress, mentalism, sophistication, and revolution in science; (c) they succeeded in intimidating everybody who dared disagree with them. Since 'performance' always carries the attribute 'mere' whereas 'competence' was equated with true linguistics, interest in data and facts became peripheral; honest, data-oriented lin­ guists became 'lowly taxonomical data gatherers' perhaps not worthy of promotion and salary. Incredible and unprecedented in­ equality in hiring and publishing (at least in the United States) was the result. The MIT-establishment became rigid and impene­ trable; in short, a closed system alien in spirit to democracy and academic freedom.

1.3. I will now raise the question of what is better to do: Play a crooked game while staying honest (as if playing poker with a group that cheats thereby losing one's shirt); get out of the game and change pro­ fessions; or, devise a counter-game, whose apparent crookedness is but a means to show" to the onlookers that the opponent is the one, whose game is really crooked. Since I have tried the first solution and found it not to work, and since I will not change professions, I beg the read­ er's indulgence in allowing me to devise a counter-game of my own. It is very simply this: I will interpret Chomsky's position at face value, AS IF HE DID NOT HAVE THE CONVENIENT EXCUSE OF RELEGATING MY OBSERVATIONS TO 'PERFORMANCE'; IN SHORT, AS IF THE COMPETENCE-PERFORMANCE DICHOTOMY

I trust that this is not a 'crooked game', but merely a challenging or an entertaining one. I predict that it will help unter­ stand what makes me object to the Chomskyan paradigm thereby enabling those who believe in it to remove some of its useless ballast and retain only that which is actually useful in it: The study of surface syntax DID NOT EXIST.

42

ADAM MAKKAI

and its sadly neglected pedagogical applicability in teaching English to foreigners or the teaching of composition to children. 1.4.

According to my face-value reading of Chomsky's Aspects

Theory of Syntax

of the

(1965) the meaning of a sentence (or a set of sentences)

is understood by the ideal speaker-hearer only after semantic projection has taken place, where the semantic component is supposed to interpret the syntactically 'creative' component, the deep structure of what has been said or found in writing, It can be argued, of course, that Chomsky did not mean to say this is what people do. My answer, as before, is that (a) he either ought to have meant it (in which case he would have been plainly wrong), or (b) he ought not to have said it (in which ease there would have been no linguistic revolution). Since my declared purpose is to engage the reader in the logic of a counter-game whose purpose is to show the motivation of the opposition, I will turn tables on Chomsky and pretend that he does not have the convenient excuse of invoking the 'but I am not talking performance' injunction. I do not recognize the relevance and the intellectual legitimacy of using the performance-competence dis­ tinction in order not to have to make a theory account for what people do while at the same time promoting an irrelevant and secretly computer-ori­ ented linguistic theory alien to life, people's needs, encoding and de­ coding, the translation process, poetry, psychology, puns, and double coding. Hence I will deliberately pretend that semantic projection is something that happens in the human brain, right after reading or hearing something, as if happening a few split seconds after the received sentence was processed by human perception. Let us imagine that we are confronted with the following stanza by Horace: (1)

Integer v i t a e , seelerisque purus, Non eget mauris iaeulis neque arou, Nec venenatis gravida sagittis Phusce, Pharetra.

If  were a native Roman living in Horace's days, I would, no doubt, have an easier time of 'interpreting' the meandering syntax of this sentence, forced, as it happens to be, by the metrical constraints of the Alcaeic

43

STRATIFICAIIONAL SOLUTIONS

meter. The non-native student of Latin, of course, cannot really grasp this sentence until and unless he has rearranged it in prose form, some­

what as follows: (Homo) purus sceleris iaoulis

mauris (obligatory

neque arcu, nec pharetra

ablative gravida

(et) integer vitae, 'non eget

where the logical

venenatis

sagittis,

case is

accusative)

(0) Phusce! After

the syntactic relationships of modifier and modified, the use of the ab­ lative after egeo,

-ere

'need' have been 'projected', i.e., looked up in

the internalized grammar with the lexemes found ('looked up') in the in­ ternalized lexicon, the translator 'reads' the sentence as:"Phuscus, (I am telling you that) (one, a man) with a life of integrity and pure from sins needs no Moorish javelins nor a quiver heavy with poisoned arrows!" The sentence simply remains unintelligible as long as the agreements and governments demanded by Latin syntax are not worked out. A native speaker of Latin probably did it in much shorter time by using intuitive jumps, the contemporary foreign student of Classical literature labors at the sentence with dictionary in hand at a relatively slow pace. This, of course, has been known from antiquity to the present. It is a basic move in my deliberately devised counter game to state that if 'semantic pro­ jection rules' in the sense of Katz and Fodor (1963) and Katz and Postal (1964) were to be relevant to human behavior, that is the linguistics of what people do, they would have to be understood and reinterpreted as DECODING PROCEDURES PERFORMED BY THE HUMAN HEARER-TRANSLATOR'S BRAIN.

But human speakers, unlike computers, have no decoding algorithms built into their brains, that is algorithms which function in ordered fashion taking one step at a time. The human brain, being infinitely more subtle and complex than any computers, is of course capable of pretending that it is taking one linear step at a time, and struggling students of Latin who look up each word in the dictionary before understanding Horace's stanza quoted above, may approximate the computer in slowness and ineffi­ ciency. But even these slow students, by virtue of being human, will even­ tually discover that the sentence is in the Alcaeic meter and that it, therefore, exhibits aesthetic beauty. The point I am making here is simply that by asserting that the meaning of sentences is intimately tied to

ADAM MAKKAI

44

their structure, Chomsky has not said anything new. (I repeat that I am interpreting Chomsky throughout this paper at face value, as a deliberate strategy. In so doing I 'refuse to play his game' and invoke the rules of 'my own game'. Whether the reader agrees with my conclusions or not, I will have demonstated that the argument is not so much about essence but about political power in linguistics nowadays, The real question, of course, is really this: Who is allowed to call the shots in what constitutes an acceptable 'game' for the science of linguistics? The answer: He who suc­ ceeds in making others believe that he has the right to do so. In short, success justifies, and we are right back in the Andersen's fairy tale 'The Emperor's New Clothes'.) Since I refuse to play the game of 'semantic projection rules' on a competence basis where it does not matter whether 'semantic interpreta­ tion' is psychologically real or not, and whether it precedes, coincides with, or follows the structural parsing of the sentence in real time, I will arbitrarily assume that (despite Chomsky) there is such a thing as 'semantic projection', but I will rename it as the D E C O D I N G O F L E X E M I C CONSTITUENCY NETWORKS CHARACTERIZED BY ORDERED 'AND' AND ORDERED AND UN­ ORDERED 'OR' N O D E S . Examples below will make clear what I mean. I fur­ thermore claim that this way of looking at 'semantic projection rules' (that is, by reinterpreting the human decoding process stratificationally) brings the theory of Strati ficational Grammar into immediate and real contact with real human beings and their brain processes. In SG, the L E X O T A C T I C S (read 'surface structure' prior to morphophonemic processing) of a sentence may lead to one or more S E M E M I C T R A C E S (read: may be ambig­ uous) and the hearer-reader must decide whether from the context or from additional phonological clues (Sememic Traces will henceforth be abbre­ viated ST. ) 1.4.

We may enquire what happens when a person has to translate the sen­

tence:

(2)

visiting

relatives can be a nuisance.

If Chomsky's 'semantic projection rules' had any relevance for human lin-

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS

45

guistics (to borrow Yngye's term), one would expect that these semantic projection rules would tell us whether the gerundival or the participial meaning of the form -ing was intended depending on what the deep struc­ ture of the sentence was. Thus DS1 would read something like (somebody visits relatives) ( ((it)) is capable of being a nuisance); with DS 2 be­ ing approximately (relatives visit) ( ((they)) are capable of being a nuisance). Thus, assuming again that performance and competence have been hammered apart artificially in order to save the theory, the real human hearer-reader would perform projectioni (the gerundival interpretation), and match it against the immediately preceding linguistic and extralinguistic context; if it does not fit, he would perform projection2 (the oarticipial interpretation) and accept it if it fits. The question I am asking is this: Is this, in fact, what people do? Don't be hasty and prejudge your answer. I am not necessarily saying that people never do this at all, under any circumstances. As a matter of fact, - as we saw above in the case of the student struggling with Horace's verse under certain pedagogically quite relevant circumstances, such a composition, laborious, slow translation etc., the person engaged in his work might quite possibly try to literally 'interpret' a given sentence once this way, then the other. This old and experimentally proven fact of language pedagogy is, however, not the reason why this analysis has become so popular. Rather it is said that it can claim theoretical advantages of 'descriptive adequacy' over Neo-Bloomfieldian Immediate Constituent analysis; that the 1 analysis cannot account for the two different meanings and that, therefore, 1 analysis is mechanistic, taxonomical and inferior, with TG being mentalistic, able to approximate 'explana­ tory adequacy' in addition to 'descriptive adequacy' and that it has these prestigeous advantages because of positing a level of linguistic competence underneath surface structure, known as deep structure. It is an ironic fact that Latinate traditional grammar can deal with the sit­ uation perfectly well by using the concepts of 'gerund', 'present ac­ tive participle', 'singular', and 'plural'. Traditional grammar has fallen into disrepute because the 60 years of structuralism (1900-1960)

46

ADAM MAKKAI

have proven that exotic non-Indo-European languages can frequently be best described on their own terms, without reference to Latin-based ter­ minology. This movement started with Franz Boas in the USA, and culmi­ nated in Neo-Bloomfieldian structuralism. It is becoming increasingly clear that Chomsky was following a de­ finite sales strategy resembling Madison Avenue advertising replete with both seduction and intimidation when he invented the notion of deep structure. The ingredients were as follows: (1) Sentence syntax is the central axis of language. (2) If ambiguity is seen in the meaning of a sentence, there must be two nonambiguous sentences (emphasis on SENTENCES) that are the two respective meanings of the observable ambiguous sen­ tence. (3) The surface sentence relates to 'performance 1 as the underlying sentence-like proposition (i.e., the 'deep structure*) relates to competence' . (4) Surface structure is to mechanism and taxonomical data gathering, as deep structure is to mentalist theory-orientedness. (5) Surface structure might exhibit observational adequacy, but on­ ly deep structure can exhibit descriptive or explanatory ade­ quacy. (6) If a sentence is judged unacceptable by native speakers while nevertheless being a logically constructed, hence laboriously retrievable, sentence the unacceptability of the sentence is merely a matter of limitations on performance which does not interfere with the grammaticality of the sentence in competence. (7) Surface structure oriented linguists are reactionaries and lack insight; deep structure oriented transformationalists, on the other hand, are revolutionary, daring, and are blessed by the gift of insight.

This is the simple script of seven steps that has conquered the world of linguistic scholarship during the past fifteen years. It is as simple-minded and as effective as a television advertisement promoting a new kind of moutwash which posits that clear breath means social suc­ cess and bad breath means social failure; that smart people who want not to offend their lovers, bosses, fellow-travellers in a crowded Volkswa­ gen, will use the mouthwash, while those who are slow, stupid, and slug-

47

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS

gish will go on offending. We must now take a look at how SG deals with the ambiguous sentence (2). Stratificational linguistics recognizes that neutralization is a multi-stratum phenomenon, not limited to phonology alone, as was prac­ ticed - by and large - in Praguean linguistics.

Fig. 1 A simplified relational network analysis of the 'surface struc­

ture1 of visiting

relatives

can be a nuisance.

The Lexo-Morph-

emic constituents 1-8 are ORDERED, that is, we read them off from left to right. The status of the higher constituents I, II, and III, which depends on the SEMEMI TRACES here realized in NEUTRALIZATION, is the source of the ambiguity, if the sen­ tence is encountered out of context.

ADAM MAKKAI

48

The 'surface s t r u c t u r e ' of the sentence, of course, remains ambig­ uous in i s o l a t i o n , when we do not know who uttered i t to whom, under what circumstances, and f o r what purpose. In s t r a t i f i c a t i o n a l thought we recognize that the sentence i s either the r e a l i z a t i o n of sememic trace (ST)! or of ST2:

plane, relative child, penny, etc. nom. (nuisance, pleasure, joy, etc.)OR adj. (dangerous, lovely, neat, etc.)

possibility

1st degree

Fig. 2 A simplified relational network description of the sememic trace giving rise to the 'present active participle' interpretation with can realizing the S /Plural/. Depending what content sememes are used, the network will account for visiting relatives can be a nuisance, shining pennies can be a joy, visiting children can be neat, flying planes can be dangerous, etc. Some outcomes will be nonsensical, e.g., visiting pennies can be neat, shining relatives can be a nuisance, flying relatives can be a joy, etc. None of these are, of course, 'ungrammatical'; their illformedness rests elsewhere. See below. The s/possibility/ in conjunction with the s /first degree/ gives rise to can, in conjunction with s/second degree/ to may, with s/third degree/ to might, etc. Thus a morpheme in 'Deep Structure' such as Auxiliary will not do in a sememic trace. Will have been, would have been, should have been, etc., are all different sememic propositions accidentally realized by a set of verbs known as Auxiliaries, but their auxiliary nature is not a sememic, but a lexotactic fact of the English language.

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS

49

fly, shine, etc. plane, relative, child, elephant, penny, etc.

nom. (nuisance, joy, etc.) OR adj. (dangerous, etc.)

possibility 1st degree

Fig. 3 A simplified relational network description of the sememic trace giving rise to the 'gerundival interpretation' with can realizing the S/Sing./. Whereas ST1 had 5 unordered AND nodes, ST2 has 6; whereas ST1 had the Plural sememe in it, ST2 has the Singular sememe; whereas ST1 indicates that a predication is made of some­ thing we attribute to relatives (i.e., the fact that they visit), ST2 shows that a predication is made of a non-specific agent's doing something to some goal (i.e., some one flies planes, or some one visits relatives). This non-specific agent is not the Deep Structure Dummy SOME ONE later to be deleted, it is simply realized as 0 on the lexemic stratum with the action sememe realized as the gerund that can carry an object.

50

ADAM MAKKAI

= unordered 'OR' node indicating that either ST1 or ST 2 is to be read as the decoding.

Fig. 4

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS

51

Figures 2, 3, and 4 show the 'participial', the 'gerundival', and the joint either participial or gerundival interpretation of the sen­ tence in a stratificational relational network description. Figure 4, in other words, builds together ST1 and ST 2 without repeating, however, what is common in the two, that is, the predication that is made of the visiting

velatives 1

and the visiting

relatives2

namely, can be danger­

ous.

How does this influence our picture of the nature of the translation process and of the concept of 'Deep Structure'? Let us take a look at some real cases: A French immigrant who knows no English arrives in the United States and wants to learn how to greet people. He is taught to say How do you do?. "How odd", he thinks to himself musingly, "this means nothing in French". And he says to himself: *Comment faitesvous ça? Later he thinks: "Isn't there a verb enchant in English?" - and he finds it in the dictionary. Later, moved by curiosity, he tries out the new verb when he is introduced to some one, and says (with a French accent, to be sure) I'm enchanted. Those who know French smile, thinking that he was joking deliberately, those who don't pull a sour face and walk away from him. Later during the course of his enculturation in the English-speaking world, he gives up saying I'm enchanted and just says How do you do? routinely. A few years later he makes the acquaintance of a Dutchman, and they exchange notes on greetings. The Dutchman informs the French­ man, that in Dutch it is perfectly all right to ask Hu maakt u het? in the situation where Englishmen and Americans say How do you do?, except for the fact that the Dutch, if rendered literally, yields *How make you it? The Dutchman and the Frenchman agree, though, that the Dutch and the English greeting are closely related, whereas the French greeting is not related to either the Dutch or the English. A worker from Southern Germany joins the conversation a few months later, and informs our friends that he says Wie geht's? Grussgott, es freut mich sehr, Sie kennenzulernen, and to older ladies, if he wants to be very polite, küss' die Hand, Gnädige Frau. The German, after some prodding from the American, translates the German greeting thus: *I kiss your hand, honored lady. This creates great hilarity in the group. Now a Russian joins the conversation and says that he doesn't inquire about how people do things, how they manage, etc., nor does he stoop to kissing people's hands, in fact, he asks no question at all, but wishes them good health and says  which means 'be healthy' but is not any form of 'be' and not any adjective 'healthy' but a verb, something like an imperative issued to some one *Thrive! The audience is getting more amazed all the time.

52

ADAM MAKKAI

Now they are joined by Hungarian who observes that neither questions nor commands are very nice, and that he merely wishes people a good day when he says jónapot kivánok, but after the Ger­ man starts teasing him a bit and asks "didn't I hear you Hungarians say in Latin that you are the servant of the other fellow?" he ad­ mits that he does say szervusz, and even acknowledges that it comes from a mediaeval Latin form servus humillimus domini respectabilis sum "I am the humblest servant of your distinguished lordship". He then adds that Hungarians picked it up from the Austrians and that it is merely a colloquial greeting form among youngsters, students, or members of a family. He. also recalls that the v of szervusz ( = servus) is frequently subsituted by   in rapid speech; he, too, of­ ten says szerbusz. The German at that point admits having heard this in Austria and among German students as well. A Mexican also joins the conversation and observes that he says something very close to what the Frenchman says, encantador Señor, or encantado Señora, and the group draws the conclusion after an Italian chimes in and reinforces the Mexican's position, that Latin males are more polite than anybody else, because they exaggerate their pleasure of having met some one new. The conversation becomes a bit livelier as they are joined by an Indonesian and Japanese. The Indonesian points out that asking questions that one doesn't really mean is the most neutral and po­ lite way of behaving, hence the Indonesian apa kabar? 'what is the news?' is really the best greeting; whether the news is good or bad, the addressee will answer kabar baik. 'the news is good', after which they can get down to business. The Japanese finds Japanese customs too hard to explain and limits himself to expounding on how to say good morning in Japanese, and teaches them how to say ohayo gozaimasu and translates it to the amazed group as *it daineth to be early. "It all depends on who you talk to" - he adds apologetically, "this form, you see, contains an honorific." Our Frenchman, Dutchman, the American, the German, the Russian, the Hungarian, the Indonesian, and the Japanese decide to form a bridge club, and meet regularly, once a week. After the game of bridge, the talk turns to their respective languages. The American had just said you'll find out tomorrow, and they are trying out the sentence in their respective native languages. The Russian is first, and says  , or  , and gives the usual ex­ planation how the choice depends on whether he is on 'thou' terms with some one, or on 'you' terms. The Hungarian chimes in and notices that he can say the same thing in two words, just like the Russian, and that he, too, uses the present tense of the verb with a perfectivizing prefix added, megtudod holnap, or megtudjátok holnap, sim­ ilarly depending on whether he is close to the addressee, or relates to him formally. The Frenchman opts for tu le sauras demain, vous le saurez demain, and explains how one must form the future tense of the verb savoir 'to know' and why he added le "to make sure that the person knows that what we're talking about is what we mentioned be­ fore". To this the Hungarian adds that his choice of the definite

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS

53

conjugation megtudom, megtudod, megtudja, megtudjuk, megtudjátok, megtud,iák, as opposed to the indefinite conjugation megtudok (valamit) megtudsz (vaiamit) megtud (valamit), megtudunk, megtudtok, megtudnak (valamit) was also motivated by the fact that the item of information sought by the person who was answered you 1 11 find out tomorrow is kept in mind by the answerer. The Indonesian says Tuan akan kenal esok nari, and explains it as *Sir going-to know next day. One evening, after losing a number of hands, the American says easy come, easy go. Once again the group is back at the translation game, and each one volunteers his version of how he would express a lack of concern over losing. The German goes first and says wie ge­ wonnen, so zerronnen, and explains it as *as won, so depleted, but adds that the fact that each part, both the winning and the losing, has eight syllables in it, makes the saying highly rhythmical, al­ most like a little verse. "Hard to forget" - he adds. The Hungarian thinks for a while and says: "The closest I can come to it is by saying *what he gains at the ferry, he loses at the customs (=amit nyer a réven, elveszti a vámon.) He adds that this doesn't really mean "I don't care about my losses"; rather it implies the futility of gaining or winning. The Dutchman echoes the German quite literally. "How remarkable", - they exclaim. The Indonesian and the Japanese in­ sist that there is no equivalent saying, since they feel about gam­ bling as a serious matter, and the Russian agrees. They decide to call the Mexican who can't think anything appropriate. First he tries *facil viene, facil va, but laughs it off as nonsense, then adjusts it to a better *facilmente viene, facilmente va, but throws that out too. Suddenly he remembers that when he was in Madrid last year he heard an older person say: Los Dineros del sacristán Cantando vienen, e cantando se ván, and renders it for the group as *the dollars (coins) of the sacristan come by singing, and go b singing. When they register bewilderment, he explains: "What this means is that the sacristan makes his living by singing in church, but he spends his money by going to the tavern where he also sings ... I guess this is like your easy come, easy go, no, Señores?" As the evening wears on, they get hungry and go to an inexpen­ sive 24-hour restaurant around the corner. The American orders a couple of hot dogs. This starts a speculation right away as to how they would say hot dog in their respective languages. "*Chien chaud is out" says the Frenchman, but the Mexican counters, "no, we can say dos perros calientes con todo por favor very easy", but then he admits that this is only so in border towns, Puerto Rico, and other Spanish speaking countries where there are a lot of Americans, and he admits that he never heard it in Spain. This gives the Frenchman the idea that perhaps chien chaud is all right in Canada. He calls a Canadian friend on the phone, and reports the answer to be largely negative with a very few sporadic incidents started more as a joke. The Cana­ dians his friend knows have borrowed the English term hot dog and

54

ADAM MAKKAI are pronouncing it /ot dog/. The German shudders at the thought of biting into a *heisser Hund, and the Hungarian registers similar revulsion at the thought of putting a *forro kutya into his mouth. The Russian says "  sounds terrible". The Indonesian seems almost sick as he utters: anjing yang panas. Then he orders a couple of hot dogs in English and eats them with great gusto.

But let us abandon our imaginary friends and come to grips with the prob­ lem. The examples cited here are all common ones that occur with high frequency. This, then, is not a case of a specialized game in the cul­ ture, such as a drawing didactism accompanied by a mnemonic verse. (For a detailed discussion of how to translate such a rhymed drawing didactism see "The Transformation of a Turkish Pasha Into a Big Fat Dummy", in Makkai and Lockwood 1973.) As I stated above, translation should not be achievable under TG assumptions. Unless this is obvious by now to the reader, I will now summarize the main arguments concerning this proposition. If the semantic component of a TG grammar 'interprets* the 'Deep Structure', the most we can hope to achieve is to decode the sentence as it was given in the source language. The problem now arises as to how we shall express the sentence in the target language. Let us look at visiting relatives can be a nuisance in French. A convenient translation of the sentence would be: 3.

Les parents qui visitent peuvent être ennuyeux, r

4.

Visiter les parents peut être ennuyeux.

I take it for granted that the following facts are obvious: (1) We have not mapped the phonology of the English, sentence onto two different French sentences in an algorithmic way without regard for meaning. (By 'meaning' I mean here morphology, lexology, and semology lumped together.) (2) Neither have we mapped the morphology of the English onto the morphology of the French. That, incidentally, may be a possi­ bility. Let us see what it would yield:

STRATIFICATIONAL

English: visit -ing relatives can be a nuisance

SOLUTIONS

55

French: visit"-er parents peut, peuvent être un, une ennui, incommodité

Lining the French up we get: 5.

*visiter

parents peut être un ennui, 

6.

*visiter

parents peuvent être une incommodité

or any conceivable combination of morphological quasi-equivalences. It is obvious that a syntactically undoctored morpheme look-up, no matter how detailed, cannot render justice to translating the sentence even in one sense (say, the 'gerundiva!') let alone in both. If we transfer the lexotactics ('surface structure') of the English into the French, accom­ modating the French habit of using les or des before parents and substi­ tuting the adjective ennuyeux (both sing. and pl. here) for the nouns ennui, incommodité, etc., we would probably get (4), that is visiter les parents peut être ennuyeux, aided by the similarity on word order, but not (3), which retranslated into English gives: 7.

*The relatives who visit can be bothersome.

The only possibility left would be to attempt mapping the 'Deep Structure' of the English onto the 'Deep Structure' of the French. But that cannot be done either. First of all, it cannot be done, because - according to Chomsky - the English sentence has two deep structures. The dilemma arises: Which one is to be mapped onto the French structure? Forthermore: Are there two corresponding French 'Deep Structures'? If so, what are they? But let us imagine, that the English sentence has a DS1 and a DS 2 . Let us imagine that these are straightforwardly available and, in accor­ dance with Chomsky's claims, practically identical. Then we would have:

56

ADAM MAKKAI

English:

French:

DS1

(SOME ONE visits relatives ((this act)) is capable of being a nuisance)

:

(QUELQU'UN visite les parents ((cette activité)) est capable d'etre ennuyeuse)

DS 2

(relatives are visiting SOME ONE, ((they)) are capable of being a nuisance)

:

(les parents visitent QUELQU'UN ((ils)) peuvent être ennuyeux)

Translation, however, S T I L L C A N N O T B E A C H I E V E D . After all, the 'Deep Structures' exist in order to be interpreted semantically, and not to be transferred from one language to the next without semantic interpre­ tation! But this is the lesser objection. The main objection is that the translator simply does not know whether to transfer DS1 or DS 2 un­ less and until he interpreted them semantically. Thus he could transfer English DS1 as French DS 1 , but he could just as well transfer it as French DS 2 , and that would be an error. Thus the separate availability (and partial similarity) of DS1 and DS 2 both in English and in French is by no means sufficient in order to translate from English to French, and vice versa. There may be one way out of this dilemma, and it is the following: If the person engaged in translation I N T E R P R E T S the meaning of the sen­ tence of the source language, he has managed to get hold of its M E A N I N G . He could, then, for the purposes of expressing the same MEANING in the target language, G E N E R A T E T H A T S A M E S E M A N T I C R E P R E S E N T A T I O N based on the knowledge of what the meaning of the original sentence was. But this amounts to having to be B O T H A N I N T E R P R E T I V I S T A N D A G E N E R A T I V I S T A T T H E SAME TIME!

If TG - Bach's statement notwithstanding - can indeed tolerate such duplicity, it will have remedied the greatest malady that plagues it at the present time. But the price for such a double-standard will be the admission THAT LANGUAGE I S STRATIFIED. The interpretivist is, of course,

the

and the generativist the E N C O D E R . Now, whether one is in the process of ENCODING or in the process of D E C O D I N G depends on the pragmo-ecological fact that human speech occurs DECODER,

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS

57

not in a vacuum, but in definable and describable circumstances under­ standable as SWITCHABLE R O L E S . Both the speaker and the hearer are role players; the roles they play are regulated by S O C I A L I N T E R A C T I O N P S Y C H O L ­ OGY ( S I P ) . A person speaking (orsinging) out loud without anybody to hear him is either mad, trying to make the time pass quicker in solitary con­ finement, or walking through a dark forest after midnight; additionally he may be practicing for a recital, dictating to himself as he types, practicing reading in a foreign language, etc. But TG has not even reachec the insight that a person either encodes or decodes, let alone the even more basic fact, that a human being is a role player under SIP. 1.4. The translation process works essentially as it has been presented in my article "The Transformation of the Turkish Pasha into a Big Fat Dummy" (Makkai 1971, Makkai and Lockwood 1972), and can be schematically represented as follows: See diagram

THE T R A N S L A T I O N

(Fig. 5)

overleaf

PROCESS

A = Translation from French to English, where A' is the French input and A the English result.  = Translation from English to French, where B' is the English input, and  the French result. B" is the point in the translation of English into French at which th^e translator, having properly decoded (i.e., under­ stood) the English text, appropriately chooses the French medium (and not, say, Spanish) for the rendition, and at which general human knowledge must aid the translation pro­ cess in conjunction with what is available in French. A " serves the same purpose when we proceed the other way round, from French to English, without accidentally winding up speak­ ing German, for instance.

(

J

= Greatest likelihood of s

u

c

c

e

s

Second greatest likelihood of s u c c = strongly influenced by typology and the register, tenor, and mode of the text

e

s s

= s

-

Limited likelihood of success No chance of success

French

Lexology

Morphology

Phonology

English

English

English

Fig. 5

French

Semology

English

For legend and explanation, see

p. 58 (above)

(THE TRANSLATION PROCESS)

French

French

Language  (French)

A"

Language A (English)

*'

THE LANGUAGE SWITCH

GENERAL HUMAN COGNITION

Phonology

Morphology

Lexology

Semology

58 ADAM MAKKAI

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS

59

The translator receives through the transmitting channel (air, marks on paper, etc.) minimal morpheme building signals, P H O N E M E S , or M O R P H O N S ; in writing G R A P H E M E S or G R A P H O M O R P H O N S . (The morphons are comparable to the 'morphophoneme' and the graphomorphon to the written version of the 'morphophoneme'.) These morpheme-building, or rather, morpheme-realizing elements are decoded into morphemes, and words. The morpheme and word sequences are further decoded into clauses and sentences, and the clauses and sentences are decoded as one, in some instances as two, or more sememic traces, of which these clauses and sentences are the realizations. Having reached the sememic stratum, the decoder-translator switches roles, becomes the encoder-translator. Due to his cognitive apparatus he will be able to tell W H I C H L A N G U A G E T O C H O O S E in a given situation, hence the box on the figure called the 'language switch'. In the re-encoding process he now chooses the appropriate sememic trace for the target language. The sememic trace of the source language and that of the target language may frequently be similar, even identical, if the clauses involved are of an ordinary science article type, or a political-international newspaper article style and, especially, if the languages involved are T Y P O L O G I C A L L Y S I M I L A R . Thus between German, English, and French there will be many more similar, even structurally identical sememic traces than between English and Hungarian, English and Eskimo, English and Hopi. Whereas this is not the place for me to enter into a detailed criticism of the TG 'univer­ salist' hypothesis, I would like to suggest that it, too, can be met head-on (cf. Birnbaum in press, Makkai 1973 and 1974). Having chosen the appropriate sememic trace, the translator-re-encoder procedes to realize that trace according to the lexotactic patterns of the target language. These, too, may bear greater or lesser similarity with the sentence structures of the source language, but any resemblance is strictly acci­ dental and is NOT the result of an underlying identical 'Deep Structure'! Again, typological similarity will have a large part in any similarities. The same holds for the morphological stratum. It has been noticed through­ out the past 150 years of linguistic scholarship, that languages differ the most in the arrangement of morphemes, that is, in their morphosyntax.

60

ADAM MAKKAI

This is why traditional typology has been concentrating on the morphol­ ogies of the languages compared. (See Makkai 1973, in which this fact is discussed in detail and is graphically illustrated in terms of a 4,500sided diamond in space.) After the appropriate morphotactic arrangements have been made, the re-encoder realizes the morphological material in terms of morphons and phonemes, or grapho-morphons and graphemes. Addi­ tionally, he may realize them as motions of the hand (as in the American Sign Language for the deaf) or as distinctive configurations of bumps on paper (as in Braille). 2.0.

What is 'Deep Structure', really? An imperfect approximation of

the sememic traces of stratificational grammar, additionally hampered by the inept admixture of surface elements and the paranoid assertion that 'Deep Structure' is synonymous with Language Universals. (See Lamb'sreview of Chomsky's Aspects,

Lamb 1967.) For a detailed treatment

of sememic traces and their interrelationships with sentences see D. G. Lockwood 's Introduction

to Stratificational

Linguistics

(1972).

To illustrate the untenability of the 'Deep Structure' hypothesis, I will list below a number of sentences all of which, according to the 'Standard Revised Theory' of 1965 would have identical 'Deep Structure' slightly altered by a number of surface transformations: 8.

Jim and George hope to save Noam's paradigm by throwing pornography at the public.

9.

It is hoped by Jim and George that loam's paradigm would be saved by throwing pornography at the public.

10.

By throwing pornography at the public, Jim and George hope to save Noam's paradigm.

11.

Noam's paradigm will be saved, Jim and George hope, by their throwing pornography at the public.

12.

It is by throwing pornography at the public that Jim and George hope to save Noam's paradigm.

13.

It is Noam's paradigm that Jim and George hope to save by throwing pornography at the public.

14.

It is by throwing PORNOGRAPHY at the public, that Jim and George hope to save Noam's paradigm.

15.

It is by throwing pornography AT THE PUBLIC that Jim and George hope to save Noam's paradigm.

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS l6.

It is NOAM's paradigm that is hoped to  saved by Jim and George  throwing pornography at the public.

17

It is Noam's PARADIGM Jim and George hope to save by throwing pornography at the public.

18.

It is Jim and George who hope to save Noam's paradigm by throwing pornography at the public.

19.

It is AT THE PUBLIC that Jim and George are throwing pornography whereby they hope to save Noam's paradigm.

See

overleaf

(p. 62), for the diagram representing the 'deep

structure' of the sentence "Jim and George hope to save Noam's paradigm by throwing pornography at the public".

For Fig. 6, see

next page.

61

Jim

and

hope

save

paradigm

Noam

Fig. 6

has

paradigm

Jim

and

thro

George

'Deep Structure' of Jim and George hope to save Noam's paradigm by

George

62 ADAM MAKKAI

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS

63

Figure 6 is in no way meant as the only possible TG analysis of (8); it will, however, serve our purposes here since it represents (with simpli­ fications and omissions) that version of 'Deep Structure' which is com­ monly taught in linguistics courses in the USA these days. It can be represented also as: (20) # ( ((Jim and George)) hope to save paradigm ((Noam has paradigm)) ((Jim and George)) throw pornography at the public) # TG has claimed ever since its early inception, that transformations are meaning-preserving. TG has also claimed that transformations apply in terms of O R D E R E D R U L E S . But the arrangement of 8-19 has nothing about it that forces, say, 14 to follow 13, and not the other way round. The order of these sentences makes no difference at all; we might as well start with 19 and work our way back to 8. This is the first observation that needs to be made. Second, and more important, is the fact that na­ tive speakers of English DO N O T M E A N T H E SAME when saying 8 through 19. The truth is that E A C H O F T H E S E S E N T E N C E S M E A N S S O M E T H I N G E L S E . Let us take a brief look at the main differences in meaning: 8. This is the 'neutral' or unmarked version of the sentence. Jim and George are thematic, paradigm and public carry the predict­ able 'new information stress' in accordance with their clause and sentence final positions, respectively. 9. Hope is thematic, Jim and George are shifted down to agents, saved has clause final stress, the rest is as in 8. 10. Throwing pornography is thematic, public has clause final stress, Jim and George are downshifted to agents in the adjoined clause, public carries the sentence final stress signalling new information. 11. Noam1 s paradigm carries the theme, Jim and George are down­ shifted as agents in a secondary clause, and public carries the sentence final stress of 'new information1. 12. This sentence implies that it is precisely by throwing porno­ graphy at the public (and not by some other means) that Jim and George hope to save Noam's paradigm. I.e., throwing pornography is topicalized sememically; the result is the cleft sentence construction on the lexotactic level. 13. Here it is Noam's paradigm that is topicalized; the implication is that it is not anything else they hope to save with their verbal habits, but precisely Noam's paradigm.

64

ADAM MAKKAI 14. This sentence has contrastive stress, which implies a differ­ ence in meaning. Otherwise identical with 12, this sentence implies that precisely by throwing PORNOGRAPHY and not kindness) at the public, do they hope to save Noam's paradigm. 15. This sentence has contrastive stress on AT THE PUBLIC implying that they don't throw pornography at each other. 16. Contrastive stress on NOAM. It isn't BLOOMFIELD's paradigm they hope to save, but precisely Noam's. 17. Contrastive stress on PARADIGM. It isn't Noam's income tax they hope to save by throwing pornography at the public, but pre­ cisely his PARADIGM. 18. Cleft sentence construction topicalizing Jim Edith and Elizabeth.

and George

and not

19. Cleft sentence topicalizing AT THE PUBLIC. The implication is that they do not throw pornography at a few isolated individuals, but AT THE PUBLIC.

Needless to say, these explications of the differences in meaning hold­ ing in sentences 8-19 are'greatly oversimplified; nor are they the only possible explications possible. Further complications arise if we realize that each cleft sentence construction creates a different the­ matic structure and that within each differently thematicized cleft structure a number of different contrastive stresses are possible. Hence the number of permutations and variations on each basic, neutral (or, to use Halliday's term, 'unmarked') construction is very high indeed. According to Halliday (personal communication) the number of possible varieties (each grammatical) accommodating topicalization/clefting, focus shifting via the passive construction, re-thematicization, and contras-tive stress is most probably 2 2 5 , that is, up in the millions. It thus makes obviously no sense to order these events with relation to one another. Neither does the speaker ever think of an underlying sentence first which he then procedees to 'transform' in order to carry just the right desired shade of meaning. How could he? After all, the meaning of a sentence cannot be clear to anybody unless and until the structure of it is there for him to interpret it semantically. Ludicrous as it sounds, but it is true: I F T H E T R A N S F O R M A T I O N A L - G E N E R A T I V E A S S U M P T I O N O F C H O M S K Y THAT THE MEANING OF A SENTENCE IS DERIVED BY SEMANTIC PROJECTION RULES

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS

65

FROM ITS DEEP STRUCTURE WERE TRUE, PEOPLE WOULD BE UNABLE TO TALK. The

only way they could talk would be if they said first what they were going to say, and then listened to themselves in order to determine what they said. This is a sad comment on the great 'mental ist revolu­ tion' indeed! The -reader is repeatedly asked to remember that we are playing a deliberately constructed counter-game: We are not accusing Chomsky's model of having stated that this is what people do. What is being in­ sisted upon here is that it is a legitimate counter-move to pretend that his model actually implies that, once we remove the artificial se­ paration of 'performance' and 'competence'. It may be useful at this point to return to the Yngve quotation cited earlier in this paper. What I am attempting to do here is to show how absurd the theory would look, if it were to be a picture of how we produce and decode dis­ course in natural languages. If this counter-game is temporarily accepted (its obvious limitations notwithstanding), it emerges that the revisedstandard theory of TG turns into a perverse caricature of itself if cred­ ited with the desideratum of 'explanatory power' regarding the very im­ portant question of how humans produce and perceive sentences. In this light I hope that my observation above is now clear. To repeat: If we had to project the deep structure of a sentence to 'read it' before we unterstood it; we would literally not be aware of what we said, before we have said it. But I, for one, usually have a more or less clear ideal in my head before I open my mouth (as I hope, does the reader of this paper).

I, therefore, postulate that a speaker's intended message does

NOT start with the deep structure of the syntax of his sentence, but rather with a configuration of concepts in his consciousness, known in stratificational linguistics as a Sememic Network or a Sememic Trace. But back to Jim and George hope to save Noam's paradigm by throwing porno­ graphy at the public.

The basic task of this section of the paper is to point out that since sentences 8-19 do have demonstrably different meanings, it makes no sense to derive them from the same 'Deep Structure'. The truth of the

66

D MAKKAI

matter is that each of the above sentences has its own sememic trace, each differing from every

other in some real and appreciable way. This

is not to deny, of course, that they also resemble each other to a con­ siderable extent. But just because two brothers resemble each other (to quote Lamb's striking analogy offered during his talk at the University of Washington in Seattle in August 1973) it doesn't follow that they can be explained as deriving from one another. In fact, just as even two closely resembling brothers are the descendant of their parents (and their parents at D I F F E R E N T S T A T E S O F T H E I R L I V E S , even if the brothers

are twins!), two A G N A T E sentences (the term is Gleason's) (or, for that matter ANY N U M B E R of agnate sentences) are related to one another as daughter languages are related to one another via the proto-language, and never as thought of by beginning undergraduates taking a course in linguistics who think that English has descended trom Sanskrit. TG supporters might object at this point insisting that for sen­ tences 8-19 to come out as they are, a separate sememic trace had to be formed for each, which is repetitious. It would be simpler, one could suggest, to P E R F O R M M I N O R O P E R A T I O N S O N T H E S A M E T R A C E . (The reader is

referred here to Lockwood's introduction, 1972, and especially chapter 5 'Sememic Phenomena'.) The problem with this suggestion is that it pre­ supposes that the speaker had an earlier (say, the 'unmarked') version on his mind before he came out, say, with 18 It -is Jim and George who ... etc. This is definitely not the case in ordinary speech. The speaker forms T H E R I G H T T R A C E I M M E D I A T E L Y based on the contextual evidence avail­ able to him - as far as possible. Admittedly, there are exceptions. The most significant exception is when a person 'has something on his mind' but 'doesn't quite know how to say it', and tries a number of different ways. This sort of behavior is most evident during composition; the writer will scratch out several sentences, sometimes even whole para­ graphs and pages and start all over again. His intention is to tell T H E STORY in the most effective way; he is searching for alternative realiza­ tions of the same set of contextually interlinked sememic traces. We must, therefore, not dismiss entirely the possibility of performing minor sur-

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS

67

gery on the same trace for better stylistic effect during composition. But such trace-surgery is not T R A N S F O R M A T I O N in any conceivable sense of the term. For one thing the meaning is thereby appreciably altered; sec­ ond, the basic proposition has not been altered totally, but only par­ tially. The term A N A S E M I O S I S seems appropriate to use for trace-surgery. We must remember that anasemiosis only applies when there has in fact been a previous attempt at forming the right trace, but for some reason or other the speaker (and most often the writer) chooses to edit it. Every once in a while we encounter different wordings which do NOT carry any appreciable difference in meaning. Consider: 20.

It bothers me that she snores.

21.

Her snoring bothers me.

If these two mean different things to any one, he is entitled to regard them as the results of different traces. It is arguable that bothers is thematic in 20, whereas snoring is thematic in 21. (I do not mean for 21 to read her SNORING bothers me which implies contrastive stress.) I would like to suggest the term A N A L O G O S I S for varieties of this sort. Clearly, 1-19 are all instances of analogosis, but they are instances of SEMEMICALLY C O N S E Q U E N T I A L A N A L O G O S I S , whereas 20 and 21 (for those speakers at least to whom theme doesn't matter much) may be viewed as SEMEMICALLY NONCONSEQUENTIAL A N A L O G O S I S . Analogosis, then, is also not a case of 'transformation' but is motivated by (a) thematic choices, (b) cognate vocabulary structure, or (c) frequency of patterns. Thus if I say: 22.

It irritates me that she breathes so loud.

I have uttered a sentence that is closely related to 20 (the syntactic structures are E N A T E ) , but also one which differs from 20. in V O C A B U L A R Y . Is saying the same sentence in different words a matter of transformation' Hardly. Consider: 23.

He had to go to the foot-doctor.

2k,

He had to go to the podiatrist.

68

ADAM MAKKAI

Several interesting questions arise, none of which, incidentally, has been faced by TG grammarians. Is podiatrist a transformation of footdoctor, or the other way round? TG has failed to face up to this problem during the past seventeen years. I would suggest that these are instances of A N A L E X I S . The exis­ tence of analexis proves that the vocabulary of the English language, for one, is diachronically and dialectally stratified, and that this diachronic and dialectal stratification can reveal itself in the speech of the same person at a given time as synchronic stratification. If I say 25.

The teacher walked around the building, versus

26.

The educator circumambulated the edifice.

I talked plain English in 25. and stilted latinate English in 26. This choice may mark me socially as normal and young, or weird, old, and pedantic; it may show the informal nature of the situation in which 25. was uttered, and the utmost rigidity of the situation in which 26. de­ veloped. A N A L E X I S and ANALOGOSIS may co-operate in the production of different sentences whose traces may differ markedly, or only minimally: 27.

Around the building walked the teacher, versus

28.

The edifice was circumambulated by the educator.

I hasten to add here that foot-doctor C O U L D , in fact, be derived from podiatrist, especially the foot from the *pod-(os). So could, addition­ ally, niece and nephew from *nepot(ism), governor and gubernational from *kybern(es, -etics, cf. cybernetics) along with father, mother and broth­ er from *parti(cide), *matri(cide) and *fratri(cide). What WOUld need to be done would be to reinvent Grimm's Law, Verner's Law, and most of the work carried out on Indo-European in the 19th century. There would still, I think, remain insurmountable troubles, as it would be almost impossi­ ble to derive dog from can(ine patrol), bird from aviary, moon frm selen(ology) r lun(ar), r grass from herb(arium) along with water from aqua(rium). The reason why I mention these semantically linked pairs in modern English is that E T Y M O L O G I C A L P H O N O L O G Y , a contemporary of TGstyle N A T U R A L P H O N O L O G Y , has attempted similar derivations. (See Lock-

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS

69

wood 1975 in press.) The way things are, here and now, modern English is a complex ecological system in which P O L Y C H R O N O L O G I C A L S Y M B I O S I S is overtly manifest. I can walk into a camera shop and ask for a three-foot tripod without contradicting myself, although I have repeated the same *IE words for '3' and 'foot', respectively; once as processed by Grimm's Law for the Germanic languages, and once as borrowed into modern English from Greek, where Grimm's Law has not been operative. Thus, from the point of view of modern English three-foot is 'older', if we evaluate age from the point of view of English by itself (this would be the E N D O E C O L O G I C A L V I E W ) , but, of course, tripod is the older form, if we look at the question from the E X O - E C O L O G I C A L point of view. Here and now, endo-ecologically speaking, tripod is by far the 'younger' form, recorded in the OED as occurring first in 1611 in the sense 'three-legged vessel', and in the photographic sense first in 1825. Analexis, in point of fact, is ecologically analogous to the various ways in which the sentence Jim and George hope to save Noam's paradigm by

throwing pornography at the public can be re-encoded in a number of agnate structures. Just as the various realizations of the sentence do not derive from one another but from the sememic network, analectical lexemes, as the ones cited above, do not derive from another synchronically. Dia­ chronic derivations are sometimes valid, and sometimes not; the language must tolerate symbiosis. The implications of 27. and 28. are obvious to native speakers of English. To illustrate how meaning (semology) can be related to sentences (syntax, lexotactics) without transformations yet in such a way that AGNATE and E N A T E structures are accounted for (indeed 'generativity' is nothing else but a confusion regarding enate and agnate structures), I will present here one possible stratificational analysis of a set of related German sentences.

70

ADAM MAKKAI

Nouns :

Verbs;

Katze Pferd Kuh Ochs Hund Mann Frau Panzer Bett Buch etc.

weinen lachen spazieren gehen scherzen sitzen atmen rennen etc

1 = Die Kinder

schlafen.

2 = Das Kind 3 = Schläft 4 = Schlafen

schläft. das die

Kind? Kinder?

71

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS

D O W N W A R D (-encoding-)

ordered AND

D O W N W A R D (-encoding-)

unordered AND

ordered OR

unordered OR

tactic diamond tying structures on one stratum to those on a higher stratum ordered AND

unordered AND

U P W A R D (-decoding-)

ordered OR

unordered OR

U P W A R D (-decoding-)

Fig. 7/a A Key to Stratificational Diagramming

Other names:

AND = conjunction OR = disjunction

sequential ORDERED UNORDERED = coincidental

72

ADAM MAKKAI

Figure 7 describes the German sentences; 29. Die Kinder schlafen 30. Das Kind schläft 31.

Schläft das Kind?

32.

Schlafen die Kinder?

Under nouns (also eligible in the sememic trace) we have Katze, Pferd, Kuh, Ochs, Hund, Mann, Frau, etc., under verbs (also eligible in the trace) we have weinen, lachen, spazieren, gehen, sitzen, rennen, at­ men, etc. The unordered 'AND' node on top indicates that the speaker, before committing himself to one structure of the other, has the free­ dom to form A N Y on the appropriate traces as the pragmatics of the sit­ uation demand it, without having to resort to any given sentence struc­ ture (real or abstract) from which to 'derive' any one alternative. The first choice (unordered 'OR') allows the speaker to choose between de­ clarative, interrogative and conditional; as it happens the German con­ ditional (or at least one variety of it) has the same word order as the interrogative, e.g., 33.

Schläft das Kind? (interrogative, "does the child sleep"?)

34. Schläft das Kind, so können wir ins Kino (conditional, "if the child sleeps, we can go to the movies")

On the right hand side of the trace the speaker can choose between plu­ ral or singular, hence the trace will 'generate' either 35. Die Kinder schlafen ("the children are asleep") or 36. Das Kind schläft ("the child is asleep")

Since sleeping is not any sort of agency, the sememe S/Medium/ is next conjoined with the various verbs and nouns that are pragmatically eligi­ ble for this family of traces. The actual sentences are ordered downward 'AND' nodes 1, 2, 3, and 4, on the lexemic stratum. These sentences, in turn, are realized by the lexons definite article plural, definite article sg. neut.y Kind, plural verb ending-n-en, the verbal stem schlaf- the present singular

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS

i n d i c a t i v e , and the plural

third

indicative.

73

Depending on which one is

needed, schlaf will be schlaf + en, or schlaf- + t, which is a morphemicmorphophonemic matter, no longer under the jurisdiction of the lexotactics, hence omitted on this diagram. Notice, incidentally, that the 'gen­ erativity' of such a T R A C E F A M I L Y is very powerful indeed. 37. Atmen die Männer? ("are the men breathing"?) 38. Die Frau sitzt. ("the woman is sitting".) 39. Die Frauen sitzen. ("the women are sitting".)

are merely some of the possibilities accounted for (or 'generated') by this particular trace family. Given the very large number of nouns and verbs that can be predicated to each other in German in some real or imaginary sense, this trace family generates millions of sentences with­ out a single grammatical transformation or any ordered rules. It simply shows what is stored in the human brain and what paths the speaker selects when he encodes his experience. I will rest the case of sememi  traces versus 'Deep Structure' here by saying that 'Deep Structure' was an aborted attempt on the part of Chomsky and followers to explain meaning in syntax, by using the artifi­ cial examples of 'ambiguous sentences' out of context. The attempt failed, however, because transformationalists were unable to give up the idea that sentences can only derive from other sentences (or sentence-like abstract pre-sentences) and because of the computer-inspired fixation of rule ordering. Since a digital computer can only allow or disallow electricity to cross a set of wires, its choices are always binary and must be ordered. Even though Chomsky and his followers are no longer ac­ tively involved in computer work, without the mechanical translation fad of the late 'fifties and 'sixties financed by the Army, Navy, and other branches of the US government (later viciously attacked by Chomsky turned left wing politician) TG would not have developed into the binary-logic bound mechanical artifact that it is today in all of its forms. 3.0.

In this section of the paper  will focus my attention on idioms

74

ADAM MAKKAI

(cf. Makkai 1972.) That TG has had nothing of value to say on the matter has been admitted in print by transformationalists (Binnick 1974). 3.1. L E X I C A L I D I O M S are multi-morpheme or multi-word sequences which correlate with a definite syntactic function (verb, noun, etc.) and whose meaning does not follow from the standard lexical meaning of the parts when occurring in other environments. Thus hot dog is not a dog that is hot, but a 'Frankfurter in a bun'. This simple observation in itself completely defeats TG in one simple shot, since this fact cannot be accounted for by any derivation, transformation, or any other arti­ fact of the system. If you start with a DS derivation predicating of a certain N to BE ADJ., you will wind up with a surface construction hot dog, which, however, will be stressed the wrong way. The same goes for redcap, hóuse,

which is not a red and bláckbird,

cáp.

The lihite

which is not black

House, bird.

which is not

white

Lees in his Grammar of

English Nominalizations (Lees 1960) openly admitted that the generative method has no way of accounting for such semantically aberrant and ir­ regularly stressed forms. The point I must reiterate here is that these idioms do not D E R I V E from any underlying and syntactically mechanically produceable form. (That these forms, too, have syntax, is commonplace knowledge; but the internal syntax of idioms and their behavior in sen­ tences are two independent matters.) In SG the lexical idiom is a complex 'AND' node that leads 'downward' to its constituent lexons and morphemes which, in other environments, are the realizates of other lexemes and sememes with the idiomatic lexeme having its own separate sememe. SG does not commit the error, in other words, of trying to derive hót dòg from some fictitious (the dog ((WH dog BE hot)) ) while due to the sen­ sitivity and flexibility of the relational network system it can accu­ rately show what an idiom means, how it is realized, and what is does in the sentence. 3.2. S E M E M I C I D I O M S are sentence or clause-length, institutionalized utterances which are the realizations of more than one sememic trace. In this regard, then, sememic idioms resemble 'ambiguous sentences'. Fig­ ure 8 shows the sememic idiom don't count your chickens before they're

75

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS hatched.

The CONTEXTUAL ADJUSTABILITY PRINCIPLE (C.A.P.) as a function

of cognition signals to the individual whether to encode the sentence in the sense 'do not enumerate your fledgling chicks before they are out of their shells' (ST 1) or in the idiomatic sense 'refrain from celebrat­ ing prematurely' (ST 2 ). The black unordered 'AND' on the left may or may not be called into play regulated by the unordered 'OR' above it; if it is, the decoder decodes I N B O T H S E N S E S which amounts to P U N N I N G O N T H E I D I O M . Such a situation can arise if a farmer actually counts yet unhatched chicks and some one warns him by saying the proverb; it would be signalled that he is foolish for celebrating prematurely and that he is enumerating unhatched chicks. Failing the activation of this unordered 'AND' node, the decoder reads the sentence either in the sense of ST1 or in the sense of ST 2 , as the pragmatics of the situation demand it.

For Fig. 8, see overleaf

(p. 76)

76

ADAM MAKKAI

to cognition to context

unordered AND (coļncidence concatenation)

THE IDIOM

unordered OR (coincidence dis­ junction)

SHARED STRUCTURE

THE MEANING

Fig. 8 A r e l a t i o n a l network description of Don't count your chickens before

they're

hatched.

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS

77

What matters is that there is no legitimate sense in which the one sense can be 'derived' from the other, except historically, TRANSDERIVATION, as used by Newmeyer (1972), is [+ tricky - honest]. Historically, of course, the proverbial idiom 'derives' from one of Aesop's Fables in which a foolish person did count chickens before they hatched, just as The White House is a house that is, incidentally, white, and as a black­ bird is also a bird that is, incidentally, black. (But notice: The Texas White House is a yellow this

baby blackbird

barn, the flying

is white, it

White House is Air Force No. 1,

must be an albino. )

SG, as can be readily seen, handles idioms in a much more elegant and efficient way than other theories. It accounts for their literal versus their idiomatic sense, indicates what sememic traces they are the realizations of, and does NOT,unwarrantedly, mix diachronic with syn­ chronic considerations. 4.0. What, we may ask, is the C O M M O N DENOMINATOR of the various failings of TG - if by 'failings of TG' we understand that the theory, having driven an artificial wedge between 'performance' and 'competence', will accept the output of left-to-right rewrite rules processed cyclically even if they are counterintuitive, while not being able to account for much simpler cases where more than one possible sense to a sequence of sounds is available, and vice versa. The basic inadequacy of TG is that it regards human language through M U T A T I O N R U L E S , instead of looking at it as a S Y S T E M O F R E L A T I O N S H I P S (see Lamb 1975, in -press). 4.1. In this portion of the paper, as a closing argument, I will ad­ dress myself to the common human experience of D O U B L E CODING. Double coding occurs when a lexeme, a phrase, or a whole paragraph in spoken discourse has a discernable second (or even a third and fourth) meaning beyond the institutionalized, lexico-gramrnatically retrievable meaning. 4.1.1. The simple lexeme yes has - at least - eight commonly recogniz­ able meanings, depending on the intonation and the length.

ADAM MAKKAI

78

yes2

yes1 unmarked. ' Objective affirmative'

yes3

'Enthusiastic approval'

yes4

'Reluctant con­ descendence '

'Tell me more, I am listening'

yes6

yes5

'I think you're kidding me'

'Joyful sudden re­ cognition'

yes8

yes 7

'I am registering my attention with­ out committing myself'

'What you say makes sense at first hear­ ing; let me think it over'

Fig. 9 Eight commonly recognized meanings of yes in American English (See opposite page for detailed analysis)

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS

79

Eight commonly recognized meanings of yes in American English: (1) Is by far the commonest; hence we regard it the 'unmarked' form. The intonation falls from 2.8 or 2.9 to 1 and signals objective consent. It is typically heard in exchanges such as Q: Do you have change for a dollar? A: Yes1 (2) Means something like 'great' or 'wow!' The pitch rises sharply and briefly from 3 to 4. Q: Would you like me to take you to Hawaii for Christmas? A: Yes 2 . (3) Takes up twice as much time as (1) or (2). The pitch drops from 2.3, or 2.5 to a low, drawn-out 1. Q: Are you going to do the dishes? A: Yes 3. (4) Has the voice rising in pitch from a low 1 to the top of the scale; the rise is drawn out over two measures. It sounds al­ most like a question. Typically heard when an unknown sales­ man approaches a customer over the telephone and starts making an appealing proposal. Q: Sir, I am telling you about our new investment possibilities on Grand Bahama Island where we take our customers by jet economy all paid by us - do you have a minute to talk? A: Yes 4 . (5) The pitch drops suddenly and sharply from 4 to 1 in one measure. An old, almost forgotten friend announces himself over the telephone: Q: This is Jack Mulligan calling, your old room mate from college? A: Yes5. (6) The voice starts at 4, dips down to 2 in a drawn out manner, and goes back up again to 4 filling up two measures. Q: There is this strange costume party at the Taylors tomorrow and I was asked if you'd care to come along, - you see, it is supposed to be a surprise for Joanna. A: Yes 6 . (7) The word yes is repeated three or four times in the time of two measures in a colorless, even-keyed fashion held at level 2, as if the speaker is just making noise to keep his inter­ locutor talking but isn't really paying serious attention. (8) Indicates that the person saying yes has heard this kind of question or argument before; is not totally surprised by it; that he is considering it; that he thinks the interlocutor has a point but not one that could not be better stated or improved. Typically heard from university lecturers who are interrupted by a student.

4.1.2. If we were to take transformationalism seriously, we ought to posit a 'Deep Structure' for 'yes' of which these (as well as many oth­ er possibilities) would be 'transformations'. They could be called the 'Enthusiasm Transformation', the 'Reluctance Transformation', the 'Tell

80

ADAM MAKKAI

Me More Transformation', the 'I am So Glad Transformation', the 'Kidd­ ing Transformation', the 'Noncommittal Transformation', and the 'I heard that Before Transformation', respectively. The first one may be regarded as the 'Deep Structure of yes'. I have no idea how these transformations would be ordered, or what would trigger them. Depending on where the grammarian stood with regard to phonological theory, he might attempt to generate these intonations as phonetic representations of the 'surface structure' of yes. But I don't think that would really work. For it seems to me that it is in the very nature of these into­ nations that the MEANING of the given yes rests; as if phonetics were N O T theend result of a transformational cycle that maps surface struc­ tures into systematic phonetics, but - in cases such as these - an in­ tegral part of the S E M A N T I C S of the speech act. Stratificational grammar can easily handle situations like this by virtue of the U N O R D E R E D A N D (the coincidence concatenation) concept in C O G N I T I O N . The one line of the node goes directly to the sememe, the lexeme, and the morpheme, realized by the phonemes /y/, /e/, /s/, with the socially institutionalized major meaning 'affirmative' activated. At the same time - and without any order - another line from the same unordered A N D node in cognition can go to the sememes s /yes 1 /, s /yes 2 /, s /yes 3 /, s /yes 4 /, S /yes 5 /, S /yes 6 /, s /yes 7 /, and s /yes 8 / O N A N Y O R D E R , and at ANY TIME during the same conversation, several times. Playwrights, actors, and stage directors know this extremely well. Additionally, of course, there will be stage instructions as to what kind of facial expression to put on while pronouncing one of the appro­ priate 'yes'-affirmatives. 4.2. The phenomenon of poetry is, as I see it, not explainable without double (or multiple) coding. The simple fact that two words rhyme in a certain environment changes their relative meanings vis-à-vis one an­ other. If a child says The

oat

In the hat That chased the vat

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS

81

Sat on a mat And did this And did

that

But he looked very

sad

one of the meanings of each marked item - in addition to what it means institutionally - is that it R H Y M E S with each other marked item. In the common tongue-twister Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers; 't is a peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked

perhaps the MAJOR MEANING of the entire tongue twister is the difficulty of pronouncing a series of aspirated initial /p/-s; a fact very much on the speaker's mind when performing the familiar tongue-twister. 4.2.1. Pursuing my previous line of attack, that is, pretending that TG can be taken at face value, let us imagine what kind of transfor­ mational rules we would need to make a statement in 'Deep Structure' B E C O M E a tongue-twister, difficult to pronounce. We would probably start out with a logical proposition stating that S O M E B O D Y with a G I V E N N A M E and a S U R N A M E performed in the P A S T an A C T I O N , the action was C H O O S I N G and the I T E M chosen was C U C U M B E R S that were made SOUR. Then the deep structure would look something like:

X.

Y.

Past+choose a bundle of sour cucumbers

82

ADAM MAKKAI

Our problem now is this: how does this B E C O M E a tongue twister? X. Y. must, first of all, undergo the P E R S O N A L I Z A T I O N T R A N S F O R M A T I O N , S O we can call him John Smith. But this isn't enough; John Smith does not 'pop' with heavily aspirated initial /p/-s; so we have to submit John Smith to the P O P P I N G TRANSFORMATION. H O W does that work? The ideal speaker-hearer searches his memory until he finds sounds that 'pop'. /t/ and /k/ are also eligible, in a sense, since initially, they, too, are heavily aspirated. Thus, strictly speaking, there is no reason why the deep structure cannot become something like Tommy Tinker took a tank of tangy tomatoes, where the P O P P I N G T R A N S F O R M A T I O N (=initially aspi­ rated stop) would be present. So we have to specify that /t/ and /k/ must be out; by having a P-POPPING T R A N S F O R M A T I O N , a T-POPPING T R A N S F O R ­ M A T I O N , and finally, a K - P O P P I N G T R A N S F O R M A T I O N , unless we want to run the risk of winding up with the wrong tongue twister, such as Tommy Tinker, r, With the /k/-popping, Kelly Galley collected a kilo of chlorinated cucumbers.

Each specific tongue-twister would have to go its own specific P O P P I N G T R A N S F O R M A T I O N , and even then we are still not in the clear. For Tommy Tinker took a tank and Kelly Calley collected a kilo would result in AD HOC TONGUE-TWISTERS, Whereas Peter Piper WOUld result in

a widely recognized, I N S T I T U T I O N A L I Z E D T O N G U E TWISTER. Thus the trans­ formational rules would have to be rendered context sensitive with reg­ ard to INSTITUTIONALIZED OUTCOME versus RANDOM OUTCOME. The import of this observation cannot be overemphasized. It simply means that G E N E R A T I N G S O M E T H I N G I S N O T T H E S A M E A S CREATING I T . Gener­ ating an utterance logically implies that we knew I N A D V A N C E what the utterance was going to be, and then laboriously accounted for it by re­ assembling it. Functionalists and structuralists were, then, more honest, because they never claimed to have done anything else BUT decompose ut­ terances that were ready-made; the TG grammarian, on the other hand, prides himself on 'generating1 new sentences when what he, in fact, D O E S do is merely re-assemble new sentences from the parts of previously ob­ served and analyzed ones. Being a speedier way of operating, this creates

83

STRATIFICATIONAL SOLUTIONS

the mirage of progress and 'mentalism': M A N himself is in control behind the gears. But is he really? 5.0. In this paper I have deliberately chosen those areas of man's lin­ guistic behavior which, if TG were to be understood as a theory describ­ ing W H A T P E O P L E D O , would show beyond a reasonable doubt T H A T T H I S I S N O T H O W MAN B E H A V E S . In so doing I may have been prejudiced and unfair to transformational-generative grammar. It could be argued that there is no justification for doing this. But there is. TG, and especially its earlier miltant phase, has accused the 'Neo-Bloomfieldians' of all sorts of omissions and sorts of intellectual neglect of which they were not really guilty. Yet, in doing so, TG achieved its greatest positive contribution to modern linguistics: It has managed to ask a set of ques­ tions that was previously asked only very timidly and occasionally, or not at all. TG, in its systematic war against behaviorism accomplished a clearer understanding of what is R E A L about human language behavior, and what is I M A G I N A R Y . A S it often happens in history of science, TG became the victim of its own method. It is only fitting and just, there­ fore, that we linguists, in the name of progress and fair play, do the same to TG as TG did to structuralism: Even at the cost of drawing de­ liberate caricatures of the system. For in such caricatures the objec­ tive researcher will see the vestiges of positive accomplishment as well as the swamps and the quicksands whence there is no return. If the present paper has managed to draw such a caricature of TG while arousing the reader' interest in stratificational linguistics, I have achieved my goal. POSTWORD

The stratificational analysis of visiting

relatives

can be a

nui­

sance presented in this paper (pp. 44 ff.) is not the only possible one. In fact, it is possible to show that already on the lexemic level two tactic analyses can be carried out. It was my intention throughout this paper to keep the stratificational diagramming — a taxing tech­ nicality — to a bare minimum and present the ' philosophy' of the matter at hand.

84

REFERENCES Bach, Emmon. 1971. "Syntax since Aspects". Monograph Series on Lan­ guages and Linguistics 24.1-17. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown Univ. Press. Binnick, Robert I. 1974. Review of Makkai 1972. International of American Linguistics 40:2.155-57.

Journal

Birnbaum, Henrik. In press. "How Deep Is Deep Structure?". Proceedings of the Eleventh International Congress of Linguists ed. by Luigi Heilmann, vol.2. Bologna: Il Mulino. Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic printing, 1972.) . 1965. Aspects MIT Press.

Structures.

The Hague: Mouton. (10th

of the Theory of Syntax.

Cambridge, Mass.:

Katz, Jerrold J., and Jerry A. Fodor. 1963. "The Structure of a Seman­ tic Theory". Language 39.170-210: Lamb, Sydney M. 1967. Review o'f Chomsky 1965. American 69.411-14.

Anthropologist

. 1975. "Mutations and Relations". The 1st LACUS FORUM ed. by Adam Makkai. Columbus, S.C.: The Hornbeam Press, in press. Lockwood, David G. 1972. Introduction to Stratificational Linguistics. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. . 1975. "Quasi-Etymological and 'Natural' Phonology as Two Varieties of the Same Mistake". The 1st LACUS FORUM ed. by Adam Makkai. Columbus, S.C: The Hornbeam Press, in press. Makkai, Adam. 1971. "The Transformation of the Turkish Pasha into a Big Fat Dummy". Working Papers in Linguistics 3:4.267-73. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii, Dept. of Linguistics. (Repr., in rev. form, in Makkai & Lockwood 1973:307-1,5.) . 1972. Idiom Structure

in English.

The Hague: Mouton.

' . 1973. "A Pragmo-Ecological View of Linguistic Structure and Language Universals". Language Sciences 27.9-22. . 1974. "Take One on 'Take': Lexo-ecology illustrated". Lan­ guage Sciences 31.1-6. . Forthcoming. "Systems of Simultaneous Awareness: Possible stratificational approaches to formal poetry and music". Paper pre-

85

sented at the First International Conference on Stratificational Linguistics, Kirkland-Seattle: Summer Inst. of Linguistics; Univ. of Washington. Makkai, Adam, and David G. Lookwood, eds. 1973. Readings in Stratifica­ tional Linguistics. University, Ala.: Univ. of Alabama Press. Makkai, Valerie Becker, ed. 1972. Phonological

current

practice.

Theory:

Evolution,

and,

New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

. In press. "Systematic versus Autonomous Phonemics: A third alternative". Proceedings of the Eleventh International Con­ gress of Linguists ed. by Luigi Heilmann, vol.2. Bologna: Il Muli­ no. Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1972. "The Insertion of Idioms". Papers from the Eighth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 294-302. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. Postal, Paul M., and Jerrold J. Katz. 1964. An Integrated Linguistic Descriptions. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Theory

of

Yngve, Victor H. MS. Introduction to Human Linguistics. (A forthcom­ ing book, based on lectures delivered at the Univ. of Chicago.) . 1975. "The Dilemma of Contemporary Linguistics". The 1st LACUS FORUM ed. by Adam Makkai. Columbus, S.C.: The Hornbeam Press, in press.

NON-UNIQUENESS IN THE TREATMENT OF THE SEPARABILITY OF SEMANTICS AND SYNTAX IN COMPOUND EXPRESSIONS* FRED . 

PENG

0.0 I N T R O D U C T I O N . The separability of semantics and syntax has been the focus of linguistic discussion for many centuries.1 In recent years opinion has accepted one of two opposing views: the two realms are entirely separable, or not separable at all. One more complication arises when examining these two positions. It is that those who advocate that semantics and syntax are insepara­ ble take two differing approaches. I shall refer to them as the Syn­ tactic Approach on the one hand and the Semantic Approach on the other hand. The syntactic approach, represented by scholars like Bloomfield and Hockett, insists that semantics and syntax are not separable, be­ cause syntax (or, more broadly, grammar) subsumes semantics. The se­ mantic approach, advocated recently by McCawley2 and perhaps also by Bach and Chafe, asserts that semantics and syntax are not separable, because semantics subsumes syntax (in its strict sense). In contra­ distinction to these two approaches, I shall refer to the approach adopted in the first position mentioned above (i.e., 'entirely separa­ ble') as the Conventional Approach whose proponents may be said to be Katz and Fodor (and perhaps Chomsky as well). The purpose of this paper is not at all an attempt to solve the overall dispute among the varying approaches but to show that no mat-

The substance of this paper was first presented at the Eleventh In­ ternational Congress of Linguists in Bologna, Italy, in August 1972. A somewhat shortened version appeared in Language Sciences 29.13-19 (Feb. 1974) under the title "On the Separability of Semantics and Syntax".

88

FRED C. C. PENG

ter which approach is applied to particular linguistic phenomena, say, compound nouns, there exists the problem of non-uniqueness, and that each approach has its own inadequacy. There are three good reasons for the fact that compound nouns rather than sentences are chosen to illustrate the point. First, com­ pound nouns in any language are always in a state of flux, more so than any other kind of linguistic entities; that is, new compounds are created practically every

day, while old ones are forgotten. No such

rapid change-overs take place among prepositions or verbs. Thus com­ pound nouns reveal an important area of linguistic creativity which en­ hances the function exercised by the interplay of semantics and syntax. Second, if the meaning of any sentence in a language is not the sum total of the meanings of the individual words in that sentence, the same can be said of a compound noun, except that a compound noun is structurally always less complex than a sentence. In this respect, I am of the opinion that unless the separability of semantics and syntax is succinctly accounted for within the scope of a compound noun, no in­ sight will be gained regarding the separability of semantics and syntax in general by plunging straight into the discussion of sentences. Third, as has been suggested by Lehrer (1971:21), one major point over which the Conventional Approach and the Semantic Approach differ is with re­ spect to lexical insertion. That is, there is a difference as to whe­ ther lexical items are inserted after all the base rules and before all the transformational rules, or after some transformations. In this con­ nection, insertion is an interesting process by which the complexity of compound nouns can be tested, since some compound nouns, e.g., postman3, are in fact treated as lexical items and others are not, e.g., paper cup.

1.0

CHARACTERISTICS OF COMPOUND NOUNS.

Before I proceed to discuss

the three varying approaches briefly indicated above, let me first out­ line some latent characteristics of English compounds that have thus far escaped the scrutiny of linguists. Although three-word compounds, such as teacher

service

materials,

and four-word compounds, such as

ON THE SEPARABILITY OF SEMANTICS AND SYNTAX

89

anthropology curriculum study project, are not uncommon, I shall res­ trict myself in the present study to two-word compounds. Two-word compounds denote objects or concepts. Underlying such de­ notations is the fact that all compounds in existence were created at one time or another by competent speakers of the language (normally, we may assume, by native speakers). For instance, it is a well-known fact that the compound noun iron curtain was created (or coined) by Winston Churchill. Whether or not we can trace the creator of each compound is of course immaterial here. The main point is that a compound noun is usually created by combining two words together which are already known to the creator and the other members of his speech community. If so, then the creator of each comoound -to -be must undergo a period of deci­ sion-making during which he is compelled to choose, from among thousands of words, two particular words that are compatible with each other. For the compatibility of the words so chosen there is sometimes no easy or obvious explanation. I believe this is how such compound nouns as pa­ per towel, butter knife, iron curtain, and liquid paper were created. What goes on during that period of decision-making, no matter how brief it is, is an interesting process to which we should give some thought. First, the process must involve the task of identification (or association) in its cognitive sense; that is, the creator sees certain qualities in an object or concept and identifies them with the refer­ ents of the two words he is to choose. Second, the process must involve the task of lining up the words chosen in a proper order; that is to say, the creator sees two ways to line up two words but must choose one way over the other in order to name a new object or concept properly. At first sight, we may presume that all compounds created in this fashion are alike in that they have one and only one particular-rela­ tionship that holds between the words of each such compound. The truth is that they are not all alike. Paper towel, butter knife, and iron curtain will suffice to illustrate this point. For one thing, a pa­ per towel is indeed made of paper, but a butter knife is not made of butter, nor is the iron curtain made of iron. For another thing, butter knife has the 'word-relationship' that pertains to some kind of function

90

FRED C. C. PENG

relevant to both butter and knife, such as using the latter to cut the former, whereas neither paper function. And while iron

towel

curtain

nor iron

curtain

expresses any such

involves the word-relationship that

changes the original quality of each word involved, say, from concrete to abstract, the words in paper towel

and butter

knife

undergo no such

changes. Facts such as these are so common that they have gone unnoticed by the three approaches in question. But I must point out that phenomena of this nature are present in many, if not all, languages. Mandarin is a language full of compound nouns similar to those mentioned above, e. g., pu tai

"cloth bag" (comparable to paper bag), ts'ai

knife" (comparable to fruit

knife),

and t'ie

tao "vegetable

mu "iron curtain". Other

languages like Japanese, e.g., zaru soba "a particular kind of noodles served in a drainer-like container", and German, e.g., Haushund "house dog", may also be mentioned in passing. Given this much about compound nouns, we are now ready to turn to the discussion of the Conventional Approach, the Syntactic Approach, and the Semantic Approach, in that order, to see how well each of these han­ dles compound nouns in terms of semantics and/or syntax. 2.0

CONVENTIONAL APPROACH.

The basic assumption of this approach is

that semantics and syntax are separable. Katz and Fodor's dictum of 1963 that linguistic description minus grammar eqeials semantics may serve as evidence. Within the semantic domain of their approach three apparatuses are needed: (1) a dictionary, which provides a set of readings for each lexical item; (2) a set of projection rules, which amalgamates the read­ ings of the constituents of a construction, and (3) a set of selectional restrictions, against which the combinations of readings are checked, so that those which violate the selectional restrictions are discarded. In other words, "if an item consists of two constituents, one which has a set of m readings attached to it ... and one which has a set of n read­ ings attached to it, the mn combinations of one reading of each constit­ uent are formed, those combinations in which a reading for one constit­ uent violates a selectional restriction in the reading for the other

91

ON THE SEPARABILITY OF SEMANTICS AND SYNTAX

constituent are discarded, and from each of the remaining combinations a reading for the whole item is constructed in a manner specified by the projection rule" (McCawley 1968:128-29). But the semantic theory so proposed presupposes the existence of phrase structures. How then does this approach interpret the meaning(s) of an English compound? To demonstrate, let us take bachelov

friend

as an example

(which is alluded to by Katz [1964:523, note 12], but has never been interpreted). Following Katz and Fodor, the compound bachelor

friend

is a con­

struction which has its place in the tree diagram of the sentence He is my bachelor

friend.

The first item of the compound, bachelor,

must be

represented according to the dictionary, as having four distinct sen­ ses, namely: hache lor

(Human) (Male)-

(Animal)

[One having the academic degree conferred for completing the first four years of college]

(Not-young)

(Young)

(Never-married)

[Knight who is serving under the standard of another]

I

(Male) (Young) [Fur seal when without a mate during breeding

time] ļ





Fig. 1 Similarly, the second item of the compound, f r i e n d , may also be repre­ sented in a tree form as having the following distinct senses:

friend4 noun [A person who knows and likes another]

(Human) [A person who favors and supports]

[A person who belongs to the same side or group]

92

FRED C. C. PENG

The amalgamation of bachelor

and friend

is accomplished by a projection

rule, yielding the amalgam consisting of the set of 12 possible derived paths from the combination of the two lexical items provided by syntax. But only nine derived paths actually obtain, as the path that contains the semantic marker (Animal) in bachelor

is incompatible with any path

in f r i e n d , because of selectional restrictions. This means that the compound, bachelor

friend*

is nine-ways ambiguous, as predicted by the

approach. Katz and Fodor would probably stop interpreting the compound at this point and move on to the next item in the sentence, namely my* for the next amalgamation. But let us consider the compound a little further. We can ask, for instance, whether the specification of nine meanings for bachelor

friend

has accounted for all of its meanings.

The answer is negative. The reason is that the above interpretation has missed certain important meanings. Observe that it has failed to take note of such meanings of the compound as a female the B.A.

degree

versus a male friend

friend

who was never

friend

who has the B.A.

married

single

and does not

who has the B.A.

and has the B.A.

degree

and is

have the B.A.

degree

married

friend degree

who has and a

(as against a

and a friend

who is

degree).

What is wrong with the Conventional Approach then? The trouble seems to be threefold: (1) there is no provision of the dichotomy of (Male) and (Female) markers for the item friend* bachelor,

(2) for the item

the semantic marker (Male) under the node (Human) is opposed

not by (Female) but implicitly by (Male or Female), and (3) the Conven­ tional Approach proposed by Katz and Fodor is inadequate, because it does not allow for the existence of simultaneous distinguishes, e.g., (B.A. and unmarried). Suppose that the dichotomy of (Male) and (Female) is provided for in the lexical item friend

as in the following:

See diagram on facing

page!

93

ON THE SEPARABILITY OF SEMANTICS AND SYNTAX

friend5

| noun (Human)

and likes another]

and supports]

longs to the same side of group]

and likes another]

and supports]

longs to the same side of group]

Fig. 3

Six distinct senses now exist for friend. Of the 24 possible derived paths between bachelor and friend one-half will be discarded by way of selectional restrictions. But note that although there are now 12 ac­ ceptable paths, the meaning a male friend who has the B.A. degree and was never married remains unaccounted for. The inadequacy of the Conventional Approach becomes more serious when we begin to consider other compounds, e.g., house dog and liquid paper, not to mention paper towel, butter knife and iron curtain, whose word-relationships simply cannot be handled by the Conventional Approach. The reason is straightforward. Note that when discarding the compound spinster insecticide (1964:508) as semantically anomalous, Katz and Fodòr argue that "the path for insecticide does not contain the seman­ tic marker (Human) which is necessary to satisfy the selection restric­ In line with this argument, then, the tion associated with spinster." compound house dog must also be discarded, because on the basis of the dictionary entries for house and dog the projection rule will predict that house dog is semantically anomalous, since the path for dog does not contain the semantic marker (Inanimate), which is necessary to sat­ isfy the selection restriction associated with house. Obviously, this result is absurd, because house dog is a perfectly good compound. 3.0 S Y N T A C T I C A P P R O A C H . Before we move on to the discussion of the Syntactic Approach and in order not to do Hockett injustice, let me first quote a few passages from him regarding the separability of se-

94

FRED C. C. PENG

mantics and syntax, because he does admit some separability. He consid­ ers this question: To what extent is grammar (or 'the rest of grammar' for those for whom the term habitually includes phonology) separable from semantics (cf. Hockett 1968:69)? In reply to this self-imposed question, Hockett says two things: (1) A certain kind of separability is clear when there is a discrepancy, e.g., oats. oats

Like scissors

orpants,

has no matching singular. (2) "But when a difference in the gram­

matical behavior of two words parallels a difference in their meanings, or when words that are used in similar ways have similar meanings, I see no reason to assume any separability of grammar and semantics, nor any reason to separate either of these from 'the rest of culture'." (Ibid., p.70). 6 Hockett also describes the task of the linguist in the field as being "that of discovering and setting forth all those facts about a language that cannot be inferred from all the other lifeways of the community". He continues, "This would mean the phonological habits, the stock of elementary linguistic forms and their meanings (one cannot in­ fer from the rest of the culture that the word for wheat is wheat), the ways in which these forms are combined, permuted, or modified, and the alternations of meaning achieved by such arrangements and rearrangements, and the brute facts of discrepancies such as that of English oats."

Ac­

cording to Hockett, then, "this divides neatly into unequal parts: (a) the phonological system; and (b) the enormously complex conventions of correspondence between arrangements of phonological material and mean­ ings."7

Hockett thus asserts that "This second part is grammar (-and-

lexicon) in the classical sense; it is not something different from and in addition to semantics, but, as Bloomfield said in 1914, simply is the semantic system the way the particular

language

(Hockett 1968:71; italics in the original).

handles

the

world."

8

It seems that a great deal of the above argument involves the mean­ ing and application of the terms 'semantics', 'grammar', 'syntax', and even 'morphology'; part of the issue seems to be purely terminological. Hockett assumes that since Bloomfield equates the semantic structure of a language with the morphology and syntax of the language and then with

ON THE SEPARABILITY OF SEMANTICS AND SYNTAX

95

its grammatical system, other people must follow suit by using the terms semantics and grammar in the same senses. I disagree. The point is that what Bloomfield (à la Hockett) calls 'semantics or grammar' could very well be split into two portions by others, one being called 'semantics' and the other 'grammar'. This terminological difference may be shown in the following diagram:9 Syntax

Semantics Syntax

Semantics or Grammar L Morphology

Grammar Morphologyl \Grammar Phonology

Phonology

Hockett

Others Fig. 4

Suppose now that we let Hockett assume that semantics equals gram­ mar. His Syntactic Approach then entails classifying all the compound nouns of any language into types. But since it is a regular feature of this approach that no compound noun is an exocentric construction he only has one type of construction at his disposal, namely, endocentric construction. For the latter, Hockett (1958:186) has listed four sub­ types : I. II. III. and

IV.

Like 'stone w a l l ' , where the second item is the head Like 'operation head

Coronet', where the first item is the

Like 'as good as that', where the inner constituent is the head Like ' d i d not go', where the outer construction is the head.

Of the four subtypes, only the first, i.e., Attribute-Head type, is applicable to the analysis of such compounds as paper towel, butter knife, and iron c u r t a i n . In other words, if we follow Hockett's Syn­ tactic Approach, which he regards as "the way the English language han-

96

FRED C. C. PENG

dles the world," most English compounds must invariably be lumped to­ gether under one and only one type of endocentric construction, and we cannot do anything else about them. But we have already shown that paper

towel,

butter knife, and iron

curtain

are not just similar

endocentric constructions; rather, they involve differing meaning-re­ lationships. Something must be seriously wrong with the approach if it fails to account for such facts. The best Hockett could hope for, then, would be to further classify the endocentric construction of the Attri­ bute-Head subtype. Consequently, paper towel, butter knife and iron curtain would automatically belong to three sub-subtypes. The next prob­ lem would be whether paper tiger should be assigned to paper towel or iron curtain or to a separate subtype of its own. The inadequacy of the Syntactic Approach may be further demonstrated if we consider more carefully what Hockett says about the brute facts of discrepancies. Actually, the brute facts of discrepancies are more widespread in English than Hockett imagines. Take the pairing of state­ ment/question in English, for example. Normally, a statement in English has a matching interrogative. But many sentences involving the phrase used to do' not; that is to say, a statement like he used to eat snakes lacks a matching question, the hypothetical one *did he used to eat snakes? being generally regarded as ungrammatical (cf. Peng 1969). (Even if *did he used to eat snakes is acceptable to and actually em­ ployed by some, the verb used to lacks its progressive form, past par­ ticipial which all the other verbs have in English, assuming of course that the present form is use to or used to with the same pronunciation.) Moreover, Hockett evidently overlooks words like sight and vision when he says that he sees no reason to assume any separability of semantics and grammar. His reasoning is based solely on the premise that a dif­ ference in the grammatical behavior of two words must parallel a dif­ ference in their meanings and that words which are used in similar ways have similar meanings. But this premise is false, because sight and vision are synonyms, when used in the context of she lost her . . . , that is, she lost

her sight

and she lost

her vision

are more or less inter­

changeable, but become antonyms, when used in the context of she is a...,

97

ON THE SEPARABILITY OF SEMANTICS AND SYNTAX

that is, she is a sight

and she is a vision

are opposed in meaning, and

not at all interchangeable. Note that in either case the environments of sight

and vision

are identical.

It must follow that the Syntactic Approach has failed to account for something that is not observable in the mere combination of words and their external phonetic forms, something that can only be properly taken care of outside "the ways in which these forms are combined, permuted, or modified, and the alternations of meaning achieved by such arrangements and rearrangements." Obviously, Hockett cannot hope to adequately explain the difference between horse shoes and

alligator

shoes with regard to the word-relationships between the words in each expression by showing how the three words, horse,

alligator

and shoes

are combined, arranged, rearranged, or permuted. 4.0

SEMANTIC APPROACH.

McCawley's position is a little difficult to

delineate. For the most part, it is because he has changed from one position to another rather abruptly. Earlier, he believed in the valid­ ity of deep structure and vigorously supported the use of semantic selectional restrictions: "I will now present an argument that an adequate account of selection must be in terms of semantic selectional restric­ tions such as those of Katz and Fodor (1963) and that there is no reason to have the 'syntactic selectional features' of Chomsky (1965) nor the complicated machinery for creating 'complex symbols' which the use of such features entails" (McCawley 1968:133). But more recently he not only rejects the validity of deep structure completely but also abandons the use of selectional restrictions altogether: "The general outline of this argument for rejecting a level of 'deep structure' is, of course, identical to that of Halle's (1959) celebrated argument for rejecting a 'phonemic level'" (McCawley 1970a:172). In the same article (p.167) he also says: "I see no reason for believing that selectional restric­ tions have any independent status in linguistics". This change of thinking is considerable, because earlier he was in line with Katz and Fodor, adhering to the belief that syntax and seman­ tics are separable; now he reverses his belief, indicating on the con-

98

FRED C. C. PENG

trary that "there is no natural breaking point between a 'syntactic component' and a 'semantic component' of a grammar such as the level of 'deep structure' was envisioned to be in Chomsky (1965)..." (McCawley 1970a:171-72). 10 The current position McCawley takes, as of 1970, may thus be summed up as follows: "The conception of grammar within which I am investigat­ ing 'prelexical transformations' such as Predicate raising is a version of transformational grammar in which there is no such level as Chomsky's deep structure', the base component of a grammar generates semantic re­ presentations, and the 'dictionary entries' for the various lexical items are in effect transformations which insert those lexical items in place of various complexes of semantic material that may arise through pre­ lexical transformations" (McCawley 1970b:52). His semantic representa­ tions "are to form the input to a system of transformations that relate meaning to superficial form"

(op.cit.,

36-37). It is in this sense that

McCawley may be said to be the advocate of semantics subsuming syntax. Even on this view, however, it is still hard to see how McCawley would handle the kind of compounds with which we have been concerned. This is mainly because he is concerned with semantic representations which more or less follow symbolic logic,

11

and accounts mostly for

sentences - in particular, those which have more than one reading though he does deal with the question of the semantic representations of lexical items (or the question of the relation of lexical items to semantic representations; cf. McCawley 1970b:49). Observe that he em­ phasizes that "lexical items may be related in a sufficiently indirect way to semantic representations of sentences in which they appear that they will not directly match portions of those semantic representations" (loc.cit.).

As an example of this emphasis, he cites kill;

he says "the

semantic elements that are involved in a lexical item are separated f rom each other in the semantic representations of sentences involving that lexical item" (ibid.).

But the semantic representation of this item en­

tails having a clause containing kill.

Thus, the semantic representation

of something of the form 'x kill y' would be according to McCawley (1970 b:49-50):

ON THE SEPARABILITY OF SEMANTICS AND SYNTAX

99

Cause

McCawley (1970b:50) then suggests that "English has a system of mecha­ nisms for regrouping semantic elements, one of these being a transfor­ mation of 'predicate raising', which optionally ajoins a predicate to the predicate of the next higher sentence". At the end of the applica­ tion of Predicate raising, figure 5 becomes figure 6 as follows:

When this structure is eventually obtained in which Cause, Become, Not, and Alive are joined together, McCawley (1970b:51) says that "it is that stage of the derivation rather than semantic representation per se at which it is determined what lexical items may be used in a sen­ tence with a given semantic representation". What this means, then, is that eyery lexical item must originate from a clause whose semantic representation (containing the semantic elements of the lexical item) must undergo a series of transformations, before that item can be in­ serted into a sentence whose semantic representation will in turn under­ go a series of transformations before the sentence can be related to superficial forms for phonetic manifestations. The question we must ask now is how McCawley would relate the se-

100

FRED C. C. PENG

mantic elements of a compound to the semantic representation of a sen­ tence which contains the compound. Since he has already rejected Katz and Fodor's projection rules, which entail selectional restrictions which he has abandoned, he obviously cannot combine (or amalgamate) two lexical items to form an amalgam so that the compound can be inserted as such into a sentence whose semantic representation will then continue to be transformed. The only alternative left for McCawley is that the lexical items involved in a compound are inserted separately. Two choices are conceivable here. First, McCawley could insert each such lexical item individually and directly into the semantic representation of a sentence at a certain stage of the derivation. Second, McCawley could treat a compound noun as if it were a sentence having a semantic representation of its own. Into this pseudo-semantic representation the two lexical items of a compound noun are inserted separately at certain stages of their derivations. On the completion of such lexical inser­ tions, the pseudo-semantic representation could then undergo a series of transformations for its own insertion into the semantic representa­ tion of a sentence. But note that there is a distinction between the insertion of a verb and that of a noun. The transformations required for the former are 'Predicate raising', as in the case of k i l l , but those required for the latter are called 'Generalized conjunction reduc­ tions', both, however, being regarded as Prelexical transformations (cf. McCawley 1970b:52-53). The handling of compound nouns naturally pertains to the latter and the two choices mentioned above belong here. But there is a serious problem in carrying out Generalized conjunction reductions. The lexical item daughter

is said to be a 'transitive noun'; it is

broken down into Offspring and Female, the former expressing a binary relation but the latter a one-place predicate (cf. McCawley 1970b:53). In tree representation, daughter

becomes

ON THE SEPARABILITY OF SEMANTICS AND SYNTAX

101

This tree representation must then be converted into one in which Off­ spring and Female are combined into a single constituent as shown in figure 8.

Offspring

And

Female Fig.

x

8

The problem now is: What are the tree representations of the lexical items bachelor and friend when they occur in the compound bachelor friend?. More precisely, how many lexical items are there which are pro­ nounced bachelor and how many lexical items are there which are pro­ nounced friend and exactly what tree representation will each such lex­ ical item take? Earlier, while agreeing with Katz and Fodor on their four senses of the word bachelor , McCawley (1965:126) favors Weinreich's (1966) conception of 'lexical item' and argues that "there would simply be four lexical items pronounced bachelor rather than a single fourways ambiguous lexical item". In line with this argument, there would then be three, or possibly six, lexical items pronounced friend. Given the two alternatives suggested above, how would McCawley propose to in­ sert these lexical items separately into the semantic representation of a sentence? The only conceivable way out would be to regard a sentence like (1) I have a bachelor

friend

as having nine, or possibly twelve, semantic representations which may be diagrammed as follows: (I x (bachelor friend (x have y))) where n = 1, ... , or 9 or 12. If (1) is construed in this way, no matter which alternative one chooses the number of prelexical transformations will be enormously increased: However, there is one advantage; that is, one of the tree representations of bachelor may be diagrammed as

102

FRED C. C. PENG

Fig. 9 which can be converted into figure 10 by way of Generalized conjunction reduction as

Fig. 10 When inserted, the meaning a male friend

never married

of the compound bachelor

who has the B.A.

friend,

degree

and was

which the Conventional

Approach has failed to account for, can now be taken care of by the Semantic Approach. On the other hand, the Semantic Approach gives rise to an addi­ tional problem which the Conventional Approach does not have. That is, whichever alternative of the two suggested above is chosen, McCawley must decide whether the first or the second item of a compound under­ goes generalized conjunction reductions first. Can the decision be ar­ bitrary or must there be some kind of ordering principle? With friend,

ha.chelor

does it make any difference one way or the other? Does the same

decision apply to operation

Coronet?. Note that the base component in the

Semantic Approach no longer contains a phrase structure grammar. Thus, logically speaking, there should be no information available as to which item of a compound is head and which is its modifier. It seems to me, however, that some kind of ordering is necessary, otherwise no distinc­ tion will be made by the rules between house dog and dog house. that a dog house may be a house in which

a dog lives

Observe

but a house dog

(with the primary and tertiary stress pattern) is by no means a dog that lives

in a house.

Where would McCawley obtain the syntactic information

ON THE SEPARABILITY OF SEMANTICS AND SYNTAX

103

concerning the distinction, when he applies prelexical transformations to the two compounds? Or is the distinction between them unnecessary prior to their insertions into the semantic representations of sentences? If so, I would like to know why, because there is no a priori reason that two distinct compounds have to be differentiated in terms of seman­ tic representations. Something must be seriously wrong with the Seman­ tic Approach if it cannot account for the distinction between house dog and dog house in obvious and readily available terms of word order, be­ cause the Syntactic Approach can account for it quite well by making good use of word order. 5,0 C O N C L U S I O N . I have tried to show how well each of the three ap­ proaches handles compound nouns. It looks as if none of them is capable of dealing with compound nouns adequately. Perhaps it is time that we stopped to enquire where we have gone wrong and where we are heading in our theorizing, before we go too far astray. One possibility is to re­ examine what language is. Is thinking essentially bound up with lan­ guage or not? If thinking can be done independently, language is cer­ tainly not genetic or innate. I am inclined to believe that thought and language are two different things, the former being genetic and the lat­ ter a cultural product. It is in the light of this distinction that lin­ guistic phenomena can be most adequately analyzed.

N O T E S 1

The Stoic anomalists, for example, displayed an important insight into the semantic structure of language, namely, that word meanings do not exist in isolation and may differ according to the collocation in which they are used. It should be noted, however, that there are variations in approach among generative semanticists.

3

Recently, the expression chairman has become the target for women's lib. As a result, there now exist such expressions as chairwoman, chairperson, and even chairpeople. This makes the address system quite difficult to follow. For instance, one used to say Mr. Chairman!

104

FRED C. C. PENG or Madam Chairman! Now, do we dare say Mrs. Chairwoman oder Miss Chairwomen or Mrs. Chairperson or Miss Chairperson or Mr. and Mrs. Chairpeople? During the Democratic Convention in Florida in 1972, one delegate addressed the chairman, who happened to be a woman, as Madam Chairwoman three times. This seems to violate the principle of complementation of the gender in the two items. At the International Christian University, a Japanese faculty member was evidently puzzled by such usages and quite innocently addressed the woman chairman at a faculty meeting as Mrs. Chairman, which caused much laughter. Per­ haps, before very long, postman will follow suit, yielding postwoman, postperson or even postpeople, by way of analogy. Nowhere have Katz and Fodor stated that every division within a lexi­ cal item has to be binary, and I know of no basis for such a restric­ tion. The ternary division after (Human) is perfectly admissible with­ in such a tree diagram. The ternary division after (Male) and (Female) is retained for ob­ vious reasons. We can see now why Hockett (1958:123) defines a morpheme as a minimal meaningful unit, instead of as a meaning-carrier. We can also see that Hockett rests his argument entirely on his du­ ality of patterning. The passage from Bloomfield 1914 which Hockett has invoked is as follows: "The first task of the linguistic investigator is the anal­ ysis of a language into distinctive sounds, their variation, and the like. When he has completed this, he turns to the analysis of the semantic structure - to what we call the morphology and syntax of the language, its grammatical system." (Quoted in Hockett 1968:19). Even in phonology there are variations; some include morphophonemics within phonology, others do not. This matter, however, falls out­ side of the present discussion. It may be noted that long before McCawley ever realized the futility of deep structure, I had already stated in my review of Chomsky 1965 that there is no such thing as deep structure (see Peng 1969). 11 "I am proposing a system of semantic representation that is along the lines of the notational systems used in symbolic logic" (McCawley 1970b:36), McCawley subsequently departs significantly from symbolic logic.

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in

Linguistic

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Chicago

Chao, Yuen-Ren. 1934. "The Non-Uniqueness of Phonemic Solutions of Phonetic Systems". Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philo­ Linguis­ logy (Academia Sinica) 4:4.363-97. (Repr. in Readings in tics I: The development of descriptive linguistics in America 1925[to 19] 56 ed. by Martin Joos, 4th ed., 38-54. Chicago & London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966.) Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects MIT Press.

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Cambridge, Mass.:

Fodor, Jerry A., and Jerrold J. Katz, eds. 1964. The Structure of Lan­ guage: Readings in the philosophy of language. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Halle, Morris. 1959. The Sound Pattern (2nd printing, 1971.)

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New York:

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Katz, Jerrold J. 1964. "Analyticity and Contradition in Natural Lan­ guage". In Fodor & Katz 1964:519-43. Katz, Jerrold J., and Jerry A. Fodor. 1963. "The Structure of a Seman­ tic Theory". Language 39.170-210. (Repr. in Fodor & Katz 1964:479to 518.) Lehrer, Adrienne. 1971. "Semantics: An overview". The Linguistic porter 13:4, Supplement 27 (Fall 1971).

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McCawley, James D. 1968. "The Role of Semantics in a Grammar". In Bach & Harms 1968:124-69. . 1970a. "Where Do Noun Phrases Come From?". Readings in En­ glish Transformational Grammar ed. by Roderick A. Jacobs and Peter S. Rosenbaum, 166-83. Waltham, Mass.: Ginn & Co.; Tokyo: Kanto Books Company. . 1970b. "Semantic Representation". Selected Papers in Gen­ erative Semantics [from the Fifth International Seminar in Linguis­ tic Theory] ed. by Shin'ichi Harada and Donald L. Smith, 35-53. To­ kyo: TEC Company for Language and Educational Research. Peng, Fred . 

1969. Review of Chomsky 1965. Linguistics

49.91-128.

Weinreich, Uriel. 1966. "Explorations in Semantic Theory". Current ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok, vol.3.395-477. The Trends in Linguistics Hague: Mouton. (Sep. ed., with a preface by William Labov, The Hague: Mouton, 1972.)

II. P H O N O L O G Y

AND

MORPHOLOGY

HOW GENERATIVE IS PHONOLOGY? HSIN-I

0.0

HSIEH

INTRODUCTION

In the current theory of generative phonology, morpheme alternants are not listed in the lexicon.1 These morpheme alternants, which are called surface forms, are not to be derived by rules from their under­ lying or base forms which are listed in the lexicon. Thus, the task of the phonologist is to set up an underlying form for each set of morpheme alternants and to 'predict' their contextual occurrences by phonologi­ cal rules. Despite the caution shown by earlier generative phonologists in refraining from claiming psychological reality for their model, the current trend among linguists is to ask two major questions, namely, first, are phonological rules psychologically real, and, second, if they are, do surface forms have to be listed in the lexicon, in addition to their underlying forms?

William S-Y. Wang, who has guided and backed me through my long strug­ gle as a graduate student, deserves my warmest thanks here. His was the first unequivocal voice of encouragement when I began studying the psychological reality of Taiwanese tone sandhi rules in 1970. - I also want to thank Matthew Chen, who repeatedly urged me to continue my work in this field. Another friend of mine, William Orr Dingwall, also de­ serves my sincerest thanks; through his extensive review (Dingwall 1971) my CLS paper (Hsieh 1970) has reached a wider audience than it would have otherwise. - I am grateful to have received comments and suggestions either orally or in writing by many friends and colleagues; in particular, I wish to thank the following linguists: Matthew Chen, John Crothers, W. 0. Dingwall, Chin W. Kim, Robert Krohn, Ariene Moskowitz, John and Manjari Ohala, Masayoshi Shibatani, Danny Steinberg, William Wang, and Karl Zimmer. - Oral versions of this paper were pre-

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Some effort has been made to answer the first question. This effort includes such experiments as those conducted by Berko 1958, Cheng 1968, Ladefoged and Fromkin 1968, Zimmer 1969, Hsieh 1970, Moskowitz (MS), and Manjari and John Ohala (both in 1972). Although these experiments have not always provided indisputable evidence for or against the reality of phonological rules, they certainly help to clarify the nature of the problem. With the exception of Maher 1969 and Steinberg 1973, few linguists have addressed themselves directly to the second issue. This issue, however, is also of great interest, for by knowing more about the lex­ icon, we may gain a better understanding of the question concerning the reality of the rules that are claimed to apply to the lexcical items. In order to obtain empirical evidence for this highly theoretical issue in phonology, three experiments were conducted. These experiments are designed to study how children and adults acquire morpheme alter­ nants involving tone sandhi rules in Taiwanese, a southern variety of Chinese. 1.0

TONE SANDHI IN TAIWANESE

In Taiwanese, lexical tones in the citation forms undergo morphophonemic changes called tone sandhi. A set of phonological rules are observed to operate in these changes (detailed discussions of these rules have been made in Cheng 1968, 1973). The domain of the applica­ tion of these rules is a 'sandhi phrase', which is extracted from a sentence on syntactic grounds (see Liao 1971, for a detailed descrip­ tion). A sandhi phrase is bounded on both sides by a pair of phrase junctures represented by double crosses ( # ) . Morphemes contained in the sandhi phrase are then separated by morpheme junctures represented by single crosses ( + ). Tone sandhi rules apply only to those tones

sented to the Linguistic Society of Hawaii and at the 1972 Annual Meet­ ing of the LSA at Atlanta, Georgia. The first draft of this paper was prepared when I was working as an assistant research linguist at the Phonology Laboratory at Berkeley supported in part by an NSF grant.

1ll

HOW GENERATIVE IS PHONOLOGY?

that are in syllables preceding morpheme junctures. Thus, for example, given the sandhi phrase #X+Y+Z#, the rules will apply to X and Y but not to Z. A set of five rules that affect the five long tones takes two slightly different forms in the two major geographical dialects. 2 These two different sets can be summarized as follows: Rules 1) in the '33' dialect

a. b.  d. e.

55 35 53 21 33

→ → → → →

2) in the '21' dialect a'.

33 33 55 53 21

b'. c'.

d'. e'.

55 35 53 21 33

→ → → → →

33 21 55 53 21

(Note: The rules are disjunctively ordered.) Table I: Tone sandhi rules in Taiwanese

As can be seen from Table I, the '33' dialect and the '21' differ in the rule which affects underlying tone 35. While rule b in the '33' di­ alect merges tone 35 with tone 55 so that they both appear as surface tone 33, rule b' in the '21' dialect merges tone 35 with tone 33 so that they both appear as surface tone 21. Assuming that these rules are psychologically real, the direction of the arrows in these rules is justified. This is so because we can predict the merger if the arrows point to the right. An unpredictable split however would occur if the arrows were to point to the left. 3 2.0

THREE EXPERIMENTS

2.1

The First

Experiment:

Design

In our experiment, we used trisyllabic compounds each containing a disyllabic compound modifying a following monosyllabic head-noun. A tri­ syllabic compound of this kind has the tonal construction #XY+Z# and the sandhi rules are required to operate on Y, the tone in the second syllable of the constituent disyllabic compound. The trisyllabic com­ pound is a productive formation, but the constituent disyllabic compound

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is not. For example, the disyllabic compound #kin 33 tsi

55# "banana"

can be combined with a third syllable head-noun to make such trisyllabic compounds as #kin 33 tsia 55 + diam 21# "banana store", #kin 33 tsia 55 + bi 33# "banana flavor", and so on. The sandhi rules apply without ex­ ception to the second syllable of the trisyllabic compound, chang-ing, for example, #kin 33 tsia 55 + bi 33# tp #kin 33 tsia 33 bi 33# "banana flavor", according to rule a.

Ideally, there is no limit to the number

of such trisyllabic combinations. However, in the case of the disyllabic compounds, either one or both of the elements are bound forms or semibound forms and new formulations are generally not permitted.4 For the purpose of our experiment, however, we made up artificial disyllabic compounds. By replacing the first elements of real disyllabic compounds with other actual syllables, we obtain pronounceable but nonoccurring disyllabic compounds. For example, by substituting the first element in the actual compound #kin 33 tsia 56# "banana" with an actual syllable tshai 21 (>53) "vegetable", we obtain the artificial compound #*tshai 53 tsia 55#. 5 Forty real disyllabic compounds and forty artificial disyllabic compounds created out of these compounds were combined with five headnouns into trisyllabic compounds. These head-nouns and modifiers are listed in Tables IIa, IIb, and IIc in the Appendix. The subjects were tested for correct forward operation of the tone sandhi rules in com­ bining modifiers and head-nouns into compounds, and for correct backward operation of these rules in decomposing the compounds into modifiers and head-nouns. More specifically, four tests were conducted. Test I involves real compounds and the forward operation of the rules; Test II, real com­ pounds and backward operation; Test III, artificial compounds and forward operation; and Test IV, artificial compounds and backward operation. 2.2.

Subjects

and instructions.

Three subjects participated in this ex­

periment. S1 (subject one) was five years old, S2 seven years old and S3 nine years old, 6 The instructions for Test I and Test III, in which forward operation is studied, are identical; the instructions for Test II and Test IV, in

HOW GENERATIVE IS PHONOLOGY?

113

which backward operation is studied, are also identical. In the former two tests, the experimenter gives the child the names of fruits and veg­ etables and asks the child to tell him the names of stores, for example, that sell these fruits or vegetables. In the latter two tests, the ex­ perimenter gives the child names of stores, for example, that sell fruits or vegetables and asks the child to tell him what fruits or veg­ etables are sold in these stores. 7 For the sake of convenience in narration, we will henceforth use "forwards", "backwards", "reals" and "fakes" to abbreviate test items that are subject to forward operation, test items that are subject to backward operation, compounds that are real and compounds that are fake, respectively. Accordingly, items used in Test I, Test II, Test III and Test IV are called "forward-reals", "backward-reals", "forward-fakes" and "backward-fakes", respectively. 2.3.

Results.

These four tests yield a rich body of data that has

bearing on several different issues in phonology. To try to analyze all parts of the data here would mean discussing several not necessarily related topics in a single article. We will therefore proceed to our im­ mediate concerns after very briefly commenting on the test results. The results of this experiment show that the subjects do not always succeed in supplying correct answers to the questions. A subject's degree of success in a test varies significantly, depending on whether the "for­ wards" or "backwards" are examined and on whether the "reals" or "fakes" are involved. The subject's degree of success in the same test using the same set of compounds also varies according to tones in the second syl­ lables, that is, according to different tone sandhi rules. To a lesser extent, his rate also varies according to different head-nouns in the compounds. The success rates are different among subjects no matter whether they are compared in all four tests or in just a particular test, or even in just a tone category. This difference sometimes corresponds to an age difference. This is but a very terse summary of the test results. What we would

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like to discuss in great detail here is, however, the fact that these children did not succeed in supplying correct answers to all stimuli. Thus, for example, in the "forward-reals" the percentage of correct answers are 36% for SI, 73% for S2 and 76% for S3 when all five tones in the second syllables (to which five different rules apply) as contexts are considered. Although the ratios of success are substantially higher in the backward operation, these ratios range from only 73% to 98%. None of these rates, particularly those for the forward operation, seem high enough to warrant the claim that these children have learned the phonological rules rather than individual morpheme alternants. Tone sandhi rules that are strictly regular in the neogrammarian sense do not seem to be in the possession of these children. 2.4.

Can variable

rules

account

for

the results?

Of course, one may

still argue for the reality of tone sandhi rules in these children by claiming that these rules exist as variable rules. There is no doubt that these rules can be treated as variable rules as they do not apply categorically. It is doubtful, however, that by positing variable rules we will come any closer to a full description of the variations observed. This is so, because in our case as in many other cases, a variable rule only indicates its flexible overall rate of application as determined by the values assigned to the variables. In no way can it provide us with any further information as to whether a particular lexical item subject to a variable rule is (a) never, (b) sometimes, or (c) always affected by the operation of the variable rule. But such information is sometimes necessary as evidenced in the responses of S3 in the "forward-reals". These responses of S3 can be divided into three classes according to the frequency of rule application in terms of "never", "sometimes", and "always". The rules neyer apply in the first class, sometimes apply in the second class and always in the third class. For example, rule d never applies to item 28a. ku 55 tshai 21 "chives". This rule sometimes applies, sometimes fails to apply to item 27a. eng 53 tshai 21 "water­ cress". It always applies to item 25a. pe 21 tshai 21 "Chinese cabbage". Since each disyllabic compound serving as a modifier is matched with five

HOW GENERATIVE IS PHONOLOGY?

115

head-nouns and three trials are made, the consistency or variation in the subject's reactions to a particular disyllabic compound is supported by 15 tokens. Therefore, a consistent success or failure to apply the rule to a particular disyllabic compound cannot be dismissed as merely fortuitous but must be regarded as sufficiently significant. To capture this significant constancy, the linguist needs a descrip­ tive device by which he can successfully ensure the application or nonapplication of a rule to a particular item subject to the operation of the rule. The variable rule device is obviously insufficient for such a task. For in our case, the variable rule will not be able to provide any information beyond the fact that rule d applies to 40% of the items in base tone 21. Yet, this still tells us nothing about the fact that this rule applies, never to item 28a, only sometimes to item 27a, and always to item 25a. The most plausible place to store this information would seem to be in the lexicon. There are at least two conceivable ways in which the lexicon can carry this information. In the first way, one will list only the base form of a given item and attach to it a statement indicating whether a particular rule should never, sometimes, or always apply to it. In accordance with this procedure, items 28a, 27a and 25a will be listed in the lexicon in the following way: 28a.

"chives". ku 55 tshai 21: rule d never applies.

27a.

"watercress". eng 53 tshai 21: rule d sometimes applies.

25a.

"Chinese cabbage". pe 21 tshai 21: rule d always applies.

According to the second way, both the base form and the surface form of a given item will be provided in the lexicon. If an item is never sub­ jected to a rule, then its surface form will be identical to its base form. If the rule applies without exception, the surface form and the base form will be different. If it applies only sometimes, then the sur­ face form has two optional variants, one identical to the base form and the other identical to the expected surface form. To each individual

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item an instruction will be attached for the appropriate selection of the base form or the sandhi form according to whether the item precedes a phrase juncture or a morpheme juncture. In this approach, items 28a, 27a, and 25a will be entered in the lexicon as follows: 28a.

"chives". ku 55 tshai 21 : base (_#) ku 55 tshai 21: sandhi (_+)

27a.

"watercress". eng 53 tshai 21: base tshai 21 eng 53

25a.

2.5.

tshai 53 :

(__#)

Sandhl (

-+)

"Chinese cabbage". pe 21 tshai 21 : base (_#) pe 21 tshai 53: sandhi (__+)

Base-forms-only

lexicon

and sur face-forms-too

lexicon.

When we

further take into consideration the backward operation of rules in the case of S3, however, we become aware that his lexicon must be more com­ plex than the types we suggest above. For as we have mentioned, within the same subject, the rate of application of a particular rule often varies significantly according to its direction. Furthermore, in terms of "never apply", "sometimes apply" or "always apply", an item may be described in one way in one direction of the application of a rule with­ out necessarily being specifiable in the same way in the other direction. Thus, for example, an item may be always affected by a rule in the for­ ward direction and yet never affected by the same rule in the backward direction. If we use "C" to stand for "always apply", "I" for "never apply" and "I/C" for "sometimes apply", then the following nine different types of lexical items can occur in a lexicon that provides information re­ garding the application of a rule in both directions to individual items: Type . I:I ("I" in forward application and "I" in backward application), Type II. I:I/C, Type III. I:C, Type IV. I/C:I, Type V. I/C:I/C, Type VI. I/C:C, Type VII. C:I, Type VIII. C:I/C, and Type IX. C:C. All but Type III are found in the application of rule a to items

HOW GENERATIVE IS PHONOLOGY?

117

la-10a in Table IIb which carry base tone 55. And slightly fewer types are found in items of other tone categories. For base tone 55, the value of "I" is 55 in forward application and 33 in backward application, and the value of "C" is 33 in forward operation and 55 in backward operation. Although not all eight types have been discovered in a single subject, each subject displays several of the eight types. More specifically, the responses of each of the three subjects to items la-10a can be assigned to appropriate types as shown in Table III:

See overleaf

(p. 118) for Table III

33 33/55

55/33 55/33 55 55/33 55/33

5a. parsley

6a. pumpkin

7a. custard apple

8a. winter-melon

9a. honeydew 33/55

33

33/55

33

V

Table III

33

IV

33

V

33

33

IV

V

33

V

55/33

55/33

II

I

55/33

33

55

55

55

55

55

55

55

55

55

55

forward : backward

I

VI

type

I

I

I

V

I

I

I

V

V

I

ty

Subject 2 (aged 7)

Responses given by S1, S2, and S3 to stimuli carry tone 55's are assigned to different phonological

55/33

33/55

55/33

4a. watermelon

10a. papaya

33/55

55

3a. lichee

33

33

55

2a. squash

55

55/33

forward : backward

la. banana

items

Subject 1 (aged 5)

118 HSIN-I HSIEH

HOW GENERATIVE IS PHONOLOGY?

119

Each of the two kinds of lexicon proposed in the previous section can now be revised to accommodate all the nine possible types of lexical items. Both the "base-forms-only" and the "surface-forms-too" kinds of lexicon can be illustrated with the item kin 33 tsia 55 "banana" ap­ pearing in forms belonging to types I, II and IX. In the "base-formsonly" lexicon, these types will appear as follows: Type I. "banana". kin 33 tsia 55#: rule a never applies forward. kin 33 tsia 33+: rule a never applies backward. Type II. "banana". kin 33 tsia 55#: rule a never applies forward. kin 33 tsia 33+: rule a sometimes applies backward. Type IX. "banana". kin 33 tsia 55#: rule a always applies forward. kin 33 tsia 33+: rule a always applies backward.

In the "surface-forms-too" lexicon, these types will appear as follows: Type I. "banana". kin 33 tsia 55: select this form in sandhi position (__+)• kin 33 tsia 33: select this form in base position (_#). Type II. "banana". kin 33 tsia 55: select this form in sandhi position (__+)• kin 33 i . : select this form in base position ( #). tsia 55 — Type IX. "banana". kin 33 tsia 33: select this form in sandhi position (__+). kin 33 tsia 55: select this form in base position (__#).

In the base-forms-only lexicon we need to register the base form kin 33 tsia 55 and the sandhi form kin 33 tsia 33 so that the rule can apply in both directions. It would be difficult to argue for the elim­ ination of one or both of these two forms on the grounds that in the test the input of a rule is always pronounced by the experimenter to the child, for the stimuli in Tests I and II are words used in every­ day speech, and what the experimenter does amounts to reminding the

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HSIEH

child that a particular word is being "discussed" between him and the experimenter. The experimenter does not in his capacity create a new item for the child to serve as an input to the rule that the child is expected to apply. If the child used the surface-forms-too lexicon, his first task would be to identify a particular stimulus as, for example, the compound "banana" in his lexicon. If the compound is a type I item, the child will choose between the two alternating forms kin 33 tsio 55 and kin 33 tsia 33, following the instruction for the selection of proper alter­ nant according to the context of morpheme or phrase juncture. One seeming problem we notice about the latter kind of lexicon is that the stimuli are always pronounced in the correct adult forms by the experimenter. But these adult forms may be missing in the child's lexicon as is the case with type I words. However, this is not a real problem. Since a child not being able to pronounce an adult form cor­ rectly can often identify the form when uttered by an adult, it is rea­ sonable to assume a special faculty in children for perceiving adult forms. Such a faculty probably involves semantic, syntactic, and phon­ ological interpretations of words. Both these two kinds of lexicon seem quite plausible, and the material gathered here does not allow us to argue directly in favor of one or the other of the two hypotheses. It is not clear whether further experiments can be made to study in any conclusive terms the superiority of one or the other of these two contending lexicons. It is far less clear what kind of experiment could be designed for such purpose. How­ ever, we may bring in evidence from the study of child language acqui­ sition that bears indirectly on this issue. A tentative choice can then be made between these two kinds of lexicon. 2.6.

Why do we need surface

forms

in

the

lexicon?

It has been shown

that children spend many years in acquiring adult forms (e.g., C. Chomsky 1966; Clark 1971). It has also been demonstrated that the child's acqui­ sition of phonological forms proceeds according to the principle of lex­ ical diffusion originally proposed by Wang 1969 (cf. also Hsieh 1972).

HOW GENERATIVE IS PHONOLOGY?

121

According to this principle, the application of a diachronic rule affects, at a particular time, only some individual members of a category rather than the whole category itself. When we consider the matter of child lan­ guage acquisition, we find that in the "base-forms-only" approach one has to assume that the child instantaneously acquires adult base forms (serv­ ing as inputs to forward rules) and sandhi forms (serving as inputs to backward rules) for all items, but that his rule application ability in individual items develops gradually. In the "surface-forms-too" approach, however, one will have to hypothesize that the child starts with approx­ imations of all items and that it is only through several stages of de­ velopment that he gradually reaches their adult models. Therefore, if the child's lexicon is really like what is proposed in the "base-forms-only" hypothesis, it would be reasonable for the child to suddenly make a decision to apply his rules to the fullest de­ gree rather than to let this process of acquiring drag on for a long period of time. For all it requires of the child is to send himself, so to speak, an instruction of the following kind: "Regardless of the di­ rection of rule application, change all rules from 'never apply' or 'sometimes apply' to 'always apply'." However, as a matter of fact, the learning of adult forms by children continues for many years. On the other hand, if the child's lexicon resembles the "surfaceforms-too" model, the gradualness in the acquisitional process in indi­ vidual words is not so hard to understand. For there is no simple and easy way for the child to send himself an instruction of the above kind without referring to adult models. For example, an instruction for the child to convert his infantile alternants of the category of tone 55 to adult forms will have to be something like "change all alternants to tone 33's if they occur in the sandhi position and to tone 55's if they occur in the base position". But this instruction will also mistakenly affect all other tone categories. To avoid this error, the instruction will have to mention in addition that "only those items that are pro­ nounced with base tone 55's by the adult will be affected". Yet, it is quite conceivable that the correspondence rules between adult targets and child approximations which the linguist sees in great

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transparency is not as clearly comprehended by the child. It is there­ fore very

likely that the child does not feel confident enough to make

a risky, wholesale reshuffle according to an instruction which requires a meticulous adherence to complex and unclear conditions. If this obser­ vation is correct it would offer a quite plausible explanation of the lexical gradualness in child language acquisition. From this viewpoint, there is ample reason for us to favor, however tentatively, the "surfaceforms-too" lexicon over the "base-forms-only" lexicon. 2.7.

The growth

of child

lexicon.

Let us now return to Table III and

study it in the light of the "surface-forms-too" lexicon. We find that Type IX items are not found in SI but are found in S2 and S3. By con­ trast, type I items are discovered in S1 but not in S2 or S3. While Type IX is identical to the adult type, Type I is an opposite of the adult type. This difference among subjects suggests that it is likely that the present stage of the speech of S2 as well as that of S3 has evolved from a previous stage not unlike the present stage of S1. In other words, in the process of their speech development, these children have tended to abandon their original forms such as those of Type I, eventually to acquire adult forms of Type IX. Taking Type I and Type IX as the beginning and the end points of speech development in these subjects, we may arrive at several alterna­ tive reconstructions of the time order of the nine evolutional types. While we have as yet no objective criteria for choosing from among these alternatives, the sequence that is identical to the numerical progression given previously seems to be a workable hypothesis for our data. 8 In the light of this time sequence, the occurrence or absence of these types in different subjects becomes meaningful. We observe that the stages of evolution cover from Type I to Type VI for SI, from Type V to Type IX for S3 and from Type VI to Type IX for S2. As a learner, S1 is less advanced than S3, who in turn is less advanced than S2. This gradation in terms of types is supported by a parallel gradation in terms of precentag.es of rule application. Thus, in the forward operation, the rate of application of rule a increases from 16% for S1, to 83% for S3

HOW GENERATIVE IS PHONOLOGY?

123

and finally to 85% for S2. In the backward operation, the ascending hierarchy with respect to rule a is formed by 32% for S1, 82% for S3 and 98% for S2. It therefore appears quite reasonable for us to guess, by referring to this time order, that when a child starts to learn Taiwanese tone sandhi alternations, all or at least most of his lexical items will be­ long to Type I. As his learning process continues, each individual item will go, step by step, through all nine stages until it becomes a Type IX, that is, an adult type lexical item. It remains a question whether a lexical item newly added or reintro­ duced to the vocabulary of a child will have to start from the "absoluteprimitive" type, i.e., Type I, regardless of how far ahead in progress the child may be, or whether it will start from the "relative-primitive" type, that is, the least advanced type in the speaker concerned. While further study is called for, the l mited data we have had at our disposal seems to suggest that the latter possibility is more likely to be true. For example, item 7a. "custard apple" is a rare or even un­ known fruit to the subjects. When the experimenter presented this item to the subjects in Test I, they had a hard time identifying it as a fruit. Thus, it is likely that this item is treated by the subjects as a new or reintroduced word. We can see in Table III that this item belongs to the relative-primitive type of S2, i.e., Type VI. It also belongs to the relative-primitive type of SI, i.e., Type I. It belongs to Type VII of S3 rather than Type V, the relative-primitive type. Considering that S3 was nine years old at the time of the test, the item 7a. "custard apple" was probably not really new to him. If our interpretation of items such as 7a is correct, we may hypothesize that as a new item is admitted to the lexicon, it is treated first as a member of the relative-primitive type. If we further study Table III (see above), we will find that item la. "banana" is treated as a member of the "relative-latest" type in all three subjects. Thus, it belongs to Type VI in S1, and to Type IX in S3 and S2. There is no doubt that the banana is among the most familiar kinds of fruit for these children. It thus appears to be the case that

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the advanced status of an item is correlated with the subject's "famil­ iarity" with that item. The term "familiarity" here corresponds roughly to the frequency of occurrence of forms. But it also includes such other factors as the speaker's understanding of the semantic and syntactic structure of the forms. Based on these two observations, it seems reasonable for us to hypothesize that the ten test items form a continuum of familiarity, with the least familar item 7a. "custard apple" (or 5a. "parsley" in the case of S3) occupying one end and the most familiar item la. "ba­ nana" occupying the other. More generally, we hypothesize that the scale of "adultness" or "correctness" according to which a child's lexical items are measured essentially corresponds to the scale of the child's familiarity with these items. 2.8. " How does adult

lexicon

expand? At this point of our inquiry, it

may also be asked whether the "adultness" or correctness of an adult lexical form is to some 'extent determined by the adult's familiarity with the form. If the answer is affirmative, it would provide us with some basis for arguing that the adult lexicon is constructed or at least evolves in the same way as the child lexicon. Although new items are daily introduced into the lexicon of an adult, it is difficult to observe this process on a short-term basis. Nevertheless, experiments can be designed to obtain results that may shed light on the adult's ability and the procedure he uses in acquir­ ing new lexical items. 3.1.

The second experiment.

With this purpose in view, we conducted

two additional tests, Tests V and VI, in which we study adults' ability to perform sandhi rules in artificial four-syllable compounds. In these compounds, artificial trisyllabic morphemes serve as modifiers to actual monosyllabic head-nouns in the fourth syllables. The same five headnouns used in the previous tests are used here again. With the exception of the third elements, syllables in the artificial trisyllabic morphemes are either unreal or real but difficult to identify. However, the third syllables are all common actual words. These artificial trisyllabic mor-

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125

phemes are mixed with disyllabic real fruit names as control items. The instructions are similar to those given to the children in the previous tests. The experimenter informs the subject that the test is concerned with fruits and their flavors, etc. In Test V, the subject, upon being presented the name of a fruit, is asked by the experimenter to supply the word for the flavor, for example, of the fruit. In Test VI, the subject, having been presented the word for the flavor, for example, of a fruit, is asked to identify the fruit.9 Five adults who are native speakers of Taiwanese complete three trials of the experiment.10 3.2. Results. Upon analyzing the responses supplied by the subjects, we discover several interesting phenomena. First of all, we find that different items governed by the same rule may receive different treat­ ments from the same subject. For example, in S4, item 45b which carries surface tone 21 receives an overall "I/C" response. But item 50b, also carrying surface tone 21, always receives an "I" response. (See Table IV in the Appendix for the word list.) Second, even though two items may receive the same types of re­ sponses, the rates of rule application for them may differ greatly. For example, in S4, both 45a (tone 33) and 50a (also tone 33) receive a mixed "I/C" response. But the overall rating of correctness for 45a is only 10%, while that for 50a is as high as 80%. Third, the rate of rule application in one direction may be signif­ icantly different from that in the other direction (cf. Tables Va and Vb). Fourth, regarding the same test item or same tone category, various subjects may react with various types of answers (in terms of "I", "I/C" and "C") or with different degrees of correctness. Since individual items regulated by the same rule may be treated in different ways by the same subject, the subject seems to have followed the principle of lexical diffusion rather than observed the neogrammarian rule of absolute regularity or the Labovian rule of variability. What, then, is the force that propels the lexical diffusion in a

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subject? Could it be his familiarity, taken in a quite broad sense, with the test items? Before answering this question, some preliminary discus­ sion is needed. The rates of successful application of individual rules for all five subjects, in all four frames, hue, teng, kau and tseng are compared in Table Va (forward application) and Table Vb (backward application).

!

Forward Operation in the frame teng_

in the frame hue__

 a

b

c

S4

100

100

100

S5

100

60

26

S6

100

100

S7

60

S8

100

d

e

a

b

c

10

100

100

100

0

80

0

0

80

90

32

0

0

6

22

0

90

100

0

30

0

50

0

0

0

80

40

0

0

0

80

0

0

70

80

80

0

0

60

d

0

Table Va Percentages of correct responses given to stimuli in the frames of hue__ and teng__ in forward operations by S4 through S8.

e

HOW GENERATIVE IS PHONOLOGY?

127

Backward Operation in the frame kau__ e

a

b

0

40

100

100

70

0

40

0

0

0

30

30

0

0

0

90

40

0

0

100

90

10

0

10

60

50

0

10

16

30

20

0

0

20

100

100

20

0

90

100

90

40

0

100

a

b

c

S4

100

100

70

S5

30

30

S6

100

S7

S8

d

in the frame tseng c

d

Table Vb Percentages of correct responses given to stimuli in the frames of kau__ and tseng__ in backward operations by S4 through S8.

e

128

HSIN-I HSIEH

We see that for all subjects, regardless of the direction of appli­ cation, rules a and  always apply to a greater degree than, or at least to the same degree as, rules , d and e , with the negligible exception of the backward operation by S8 in the frame tseng_. Thus, there seems to be little doubt that for almost all subjects the applicability of rule a and that of rule b rank as the two highest among the five rules. Furthermore, for each particular subject, the ranking of rules in each direction is essentially stable. We mean two things by "essentially stable". First, rules a and b always occupy the two top ranks and rules c, d and e always fill up the three lower positions. Second, among the three lower rules, a particular rule consistently occupies the first position. Thus, for example, in S6 the priority sequence of rules in the forward direction is a, b > d > c, e in the frame hue_. These rules remain in the same order in the frame teng__. In spite of the frame, rules a and b persistently occupy the first two positions, and d in­ variably fits in the third position, that is, the first among c, d and e.

As regards the hierarchical order of rules c, d and e, it varies according to the subject and the direction. For instance, the above order for S6 will change to that of a, b > e > c, d if the subject shifts from S6 to S8. This order will, however, change to that of a, b >  > d, e if the direction shifts from "forward" to "backward". The consistencies and variations observed in the above may be summarized in the following two statements: (1) For almost every subject, his rates of applying rules a and b are higher than his rates of applying rules c3 d and e. (2) The ranking of the rates of application of rules e3 varies according to subjects and directions.

d and e

The first statement answers the possible doubt as to whether in our experiment a subject's success or failure in supplying a correct re­ sponse to a stimulus is dictated by his whim or due to his ability. The agreement among the subjects with respect to their higher rates of suc­ cess in rules a and b contends strongly for a similarity among their abilities in applying different rules rather than a highly improbable

HOW GENERATIVE IS PHONOLOGY?

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coincidence in their whims. In other words, what we are studying in these subjects is not their whim but their ability to apply the tone sandhi rules. The second finging, together with the first, indicates that, for almost every subject, his ability to apply rules a and  is always stronger than his ability to apply rules c, d and e. His capability of operating with rules c, d and e is furthermore determined by his lin­ guistic peculiarity and the direction in which he applies these rules. 3.3.

Why do some rules

apply

more frequently

than others?

Some may be

tempted to argue, on the basis of the foregoing indications, that the subject's normal degree of rule awareness, wich is 100% in the case of actual forms, has considerably diminished when the subject is forced to cope with artificial items. Further, they may argue, the reduction of an individual's degree of awareness follows a set pattern so that under certain generally characterizable conditions, a subject's rates of appli­ cation of rules remain in an essentially constant ranking. To state this argument in terms of variable rule, one would perhaps assert that the tone sandhi rules which apply categorically in an actual language situa­ tion have systematically been reduced to variable rules in test perfor­ mance. Unfortunately, such an argument does not hold. It is true that some­ times our data can be described by variable rules. However, at other times, the variations loom so wide that it is very doubtful that they ought to be considered as being governed by the same rule. In the ex­ treme case, we are even forced to write a variable rule for each single item. Thus, for example, in S4, in the forward direction, rule e applies to a degree of as low as 10% in item 45a but to as high as 80% in 50a. In the backward direction, rule e applies to a degree of 40% in item 45b but it applies to a degree of 0% in item 50b. The disparity in the amount of 70% or 40% is so great that it ceases to be meaningful for one to insist on treating s.uch a disparity as mere negligible variation according to one and the same rule. To a lesser degree, disparities of this kind exist elsewhere in the data from all five subjects. It is now apparent that neither the neogrammarian rule of regular-

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i ty nor the variable rule can help us explain fully the results in this experiment. For our purpose, we need to hypothesize another kind of human faculty of speech perception and production. 3.4. The power of association. It would seem that the strongest candi­ date for this hypothetical linguistic faculty is the "power of associa­ tion" or, "analogical power". It is quite plausible that owing to this power a subject responds to a new or unfamiliar word by associating it with one or more already-known words that are similar in some respects to the new or unfamiliar item. He then supplies responses that resemble in some relevant aspects the responses that he would give to the alreadyknown items being associated. Let us illustrate this power of association with item 44a. malahue 21. When a subject is presented this stimulus, he or she probably tries to associate the syllable -hue 21 with one of the several actual items including hue 21 "goods", phue 21 "to match", kue 21 "to pass", etc. that have the diphthong -ue and the tone 21. Suppose that he suc­ ceeds in associating the test syllable -hue 21 with the actual form hue 21 "goods", then what he will do next is just to respond as he would to hue 21 "goods". For the choice of the appropriate alternant, i.e., hue 53, he relies on his "surface-forms-too" lexicon. If he happens to have associated -hue 21 with phue 21 "to match", he will have to tell himself, so to speak, that hue 21 is to be treated exactly like phue 21 in the tone. The proper choice would have been phue 53 if phue 21 were involved. Accordingly, his answer is hue 53. If he fails to link -hue 21 with any known syllable, he may be cautious and just repeat what the experimenter has pronounced to him, i.e., -hue 21, without making any change on the tone. It is also possible that he may try harder only to result in a wrong association. Thus, he may associate -hue 21 with the frequently used word hue 55 "flower" that does not have the same tone. He may then respond with the deviant form hue 33. This kind of wrong association helps to explain the otherwise puzzling behavior of S6 (female) who responds with surface tone 33, without any plausible reason, to base tones 53 and 21 in the forward operation. The experimental results, some of which have puzzled us earlier,

HOW GENERATIVE IS PHONOLOGY?

131

can now be satisfactorily explained in terms of the power of association, We have noticed that, for almost every subject, his rate of applying rule a or rule b is higher than his rate of applying rule c, d or e. Since as we hypothesized, the subject relies on actual words in his lexicon for his association work, the greater the membership of a tone category, the easier a new or artificial member of this category can be associated with old or actual members in this category. As a matter of fact, in Taiwanese there are undeniably many more actual words in tone 55 (undergoing rule a) as well as tone 35 (undergoing rule b) than in tone 53 (undergoing rule c), tone 21 (undergoing rule d) or tone 33 (undergoing rule e ) . According to DOC, a computerized pool of Chinese dialectological data operated by the Phonology Laboratory at the Univer­ sity of California, Berkeley, in the dialect of Xiamen (Amory) which is another Min dialect closely related to Taiwanese, the distribution of syllables among the five long tones is as follows: 656 (in tone 55), 623 (in tone 35), 496 (in tone 53), 493 (in tone 21) and 483 (in tone 33). Apparently, due to this fact, the difference in the rates of application between rules a and b on the one hand and rules c, d and e on the other hand remains very stable in all but one subject. One way to explain the three contending tone categories that form the low-ranking group is by referring to the difference in size among the memberships of these categories. One may hypothesize that these cate­ gories differ in size to a degree that is great enough for their ranking to remain stable in each individual subject, and yet not so great as to allow it to stay constant across all subjects. Even though this is not supported by the DOC data cited above, it is entirely possible if we allow the lexicon of an individual to slightly deviate, according to personal pecularity, from the "model lexicon" postulated by the lin­ guist. Another alternative is to hypothesize that, in spite of the similar­ ity in size among the three tone categories, a subject, due to his lan­ guage background, has different degrees of familiarity with these tone categories. As regards the variation in rule applicability caused by the dif-

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HSIN-I HSIEH

ference in rule direction, it suffices for us to assume that the sub­ ject's power of association for words in their sandhi forms may be different from that for words in their base forms. As for the wide range of variation in the rate of rule application among different test items regulated by the same rule, our explanation is quite simple. Partly because of their phonetic shapes and partly because of their seeming syntactic and semantic make-ups, different test items may have different degrees of "associability" with already-known words, given the lexicon of a particular person taking the test in a particular mood. 3.5.

Child

language acquisition

compared to adult

test

performance.

We are now ready to answer the question that we have posed namely, could it be the subject's "familiarity" with the test items that pro­ pels the lexical diffusion in his responses? It must be obvious by now that our answer is affirmative. It appears plausible, on the basis of our experiment, to assume that the associability of individual arti­ ficial words in tests for adults is roughly equatable with the child's familiarity with actual forms in language acquisition. As the child be­ comes more familiar with certain actual forms, the more "adultly" or correct his pronunciation of these forms will become. Similarly, as the associability of the made-up items in tests increases, the rate of correct responses given to them by a subject will also increase. If the associability of artificial syllables in tests for adults and the familiarity of children with actual forms in language acquisi­ tion are in fact governed by the same principle, that principle is likely to apply also in the acquisition of real new words by adults and in the performance by children in tests. In other words, it is likely that the same principle of familiarity or associability of lexical items governs an individual's language acquisition and test behavior, be the individual an adult or a child. It will be ideal for our study if we can make the same subjects perform in the function of a child as well as in that of an adult, in both a quasi-acquisition process and in a test.

HOW GENERATIVE IS PHONOLOGY?

133

4.1. The third experiment. In this connection, we are very fortunate to have been able to work with an informant whose special language back­ ground in Taiwanese excellently qualifies her for this ideal experiment. The subject, to be called S9, is an undergraduate student. She moved with her mother from Taiwan to the United States at the age of eleven. 11 Al­ though she is an adult, her mastery of Taiwanese is approximately that of an eleven or twelve-year-old child. In other words, we have in her both an adult mentality and a child language ability. Our next step is to observe her performance in a quasi-acquisition process and in a test situation. It seems reasonable for us to regard Test I and Test II in which actual words are used as involving quasi-acquisitional processes and Test III and Test IV in which artifical words are used as psycholinguistic tests per se. So we asked her to take these four tests. 12 The four tests were lined up in a rigid sequence of Test I, Test II, Test III, and Test IV. The subject was asked to complete three trials of the sequence. The second trial was a week after the first and the third trial was two days after the second. 4.2. Results. Having analyzed her responses, we discover that, like the other subjects who took these tests, S9 shows a lexical diffusion. To some extent, this lexical diffusion can be also stated as variable rules. In the forward-reals, the variable rule is observed to operate only in items belonging to the category of tone 33; in items of other tone categories, categorial rules operate. In the backward-reals, vari­ able rules affect categories of base tone 33 and base tone 53. In the backward-fakes, variable rules affect base tones 21, 53 and 33. And in the forward fakes, the variable rules apply to all five tone categories. Apparently, different rules operate with different degrees of ef­ ficiency. In terms of "categorical application" ("C") and "variable ap­ plication" ("V"), these rules can be compared in Table VI displayed on the next page.

134

HSIN-I HSIEH

Forwardfakes

Backwardfakes

Backwardreals

Forwardreals

a_ (for base 55)

V







1 (for base 35)

V







j[ (for base 21)

V

V





£ (for base 53)

V

v

V



_d (for base 33)

V

v

V

V

Table VI Categorial (= ) and variable (= V) rules applied by S9 in all four test situations.

The number of categorial

rules increases from F-F to B-F, to B-R, and, finally, to F-R.

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135

We observe two striking phenomena in this table, First, the degree of successful application of rules measured through the number of cate­ gorical rules ascends from forward-fakes to backward-fakes, then to backward-reals and finally to forward-reaIs,13 Interestingly enough, the reals are higher in the hierarchy than the fakes. Second, there is a clear implicational relation in the categorical-or-variable status among different rules. This implicational relation can be formulated as d >  > e > a>  where X > Y means that "the categorical application of rule X implies the categorical application of rule Y". 4.3.

Degrees

of detachment

from

real

life

situations.

From these two

observations, plus our knowledge that all five rules examined are cate­ gorical in adult speech, we can make the following inference: The status of a rule observed to be categorically applicable in normal adult speech may change in an unusual speech situation such as in a test. Furthermore, the less familiar or the more detached from real life situations the test items are, the more likely the status of a rule in the test will degenerate from that of categorical application to that of variable application. The degeneration in different rules observes an implica­ tional constraint so that as the degree of the detachment increases in a test, the categorical status of "weaker rules" (that is, rules that imply) will disappear sooner than the categorical status of "stronger rules" (that is, rules that are implied.). (Although a distinction can be made between unfamiliarity in real words and detachment from real life situation in artificial words, we use the terms "detached", "de­ tachment", etc., to refer to test items in general.) For instance, in the case of S9, the "detachment continuum" is formed by the forward-reals, backward-reals, backward-fakes and for­ ward-fakes in an ascending order. In the forward-reals, all but the weakest rule, d, apply categorically. But as the degree of detachment increases in the backward-reals, the second weakest rule, c, becomes variable. As the degree of detachment further increases in the back­ ward-fakes, the categorical status of all but the two strongest rules, a and b, disappears. When the degree of detachment again increases in the forward-fakes, none of the rules remain categorical.

136

HSIN-I HSIEH

4.4. The continuum of reality. The mere fact that the categorical ap­ plications of rules in all four tests observe the same implicational constraint is sufficient reason for us to suspect that the subject treats these four sets of test material as having four degrees of reality rather than as either real or fake words. Our conjecture is further supported by the fact that the subject is capable of improving her scores in all four tests regardless of whether real or fake items are used as stimuli.

Backward- Average reals

Forwardfakes

Backwardfakes

Forwardreals

1

66.25

88.70

85.00

96.30

84.00

2

80.00

92.50

95.20

97.50

91.30

3

86.25

95.00

100.00

100.00

93.70

Average

77.50

92.00

93.40

97.90

Table VII Percentages of rule application by S9 in all four test situations.

Three trials are compared.

The subject is

observed to have improved in every second trial.

HOW GENERATIVE IS PHONOLOGY?

137

The ratios of success in the four tests are compared in this table. We notice something very interesting here: In all four situations, the subject has improved her ability to supply correct answers as she pro­ ceeds from the first trial to the second and further to the third. Such improvement is observed not only when all four situations are considered together but also when each separate situation is examined. Thus, the average score of the subject's answers in all four situations is 84.0% in the first trial, 91.3% in the second trial, and 93.7% in the third trial. When each individual situation is considered alone, such a steady improvement also occurs. No exception is found. In the forward-fakes, for instance, the subject scores 66.25% in the first trial. Her score increases to 80.00% in the second trial, and further to 86.25% in the third trial. No matter how close to or detached from real language en­ vironment a test may be, the subject is able to improve her success rate. In other words, she treats the four sets of test materials as four equals rather than as two different groups, one of real words and the other of artificial words. From these two supporting facts, we infer that the dichotomy be­ tween actual and artificial words is more apparent than real. Further, that there is a "continuum of reality" which extends from words that may be called "most real" (such as words appearing in every day conver­ sation) on one end to words that may be considered "least real" (such as words used in a most bizzare test) on the other. Based on this experiment, we claim that an individual (a child or an adult has the ability to absorb or "internalize" new words of any degree of reality by gradually familiarizing them or by associating them with already-known words in his lexicon. 5.0. Conclusion. On the basis of our experiments, we make the follow­ ing conclusion regarding the nature of the lexicon: The expansion of the adult lexicon and the growth of the child lexicon both rely on the same human capability. This ability is mani­ fested, on the one hand, as the power to familiarize oneself with new words in actual language acquisition, and, on the other hand, as the

138

HSIN-I HSIEH

power to associate artificial words in tests with real words. With respect to a fixed body of data, an individual may increase this capability along the time dimension. In general, for a child this would mean to "rectify" the new forms according to their adult models. In the case of an adult, he will have to "regulate" these forms by analogizing them according to already-known words. Of course, the child is not precluded from being able to "regulate", nor the adult from being able to "rectify". During such a process of learning, an individ­ ual treats a new word in natural acquisition or in test performance as a somewhat independent item rather than a token of a category. To a certain extent, different items subject to the same rule may share similar stages of development and may thus be described by a variable rule. Yet, often they are so persistently different in their evolu­ tionary status that, in addition to treating them as a category, we need to describe them as separate items. For this purpose we need the theory of lexical diffusion (cf. Hsieh 1972). If child lexicon and adult lexicon grow and expand in the same manner as our experimental results seem to suggest, it is then reason­ able for us to infer that the ways in which these two kinds of lexicons are constructed are identical. There is already evidence that the child's lexicon is a "surface-forms-too" kind of lexicon. Accordingly, the adult's lexicon should also be a "surface-forms-too" type. In oth­ er words, contrary to current belief that only phonological underlying forms are needed in the lexicon, it is necessary for us to list phon­ ological surface forms in the lexicon.

NOTES Note that footnote one has been placed at the hottom of the first two pages of this article, which was originally entitled "On Listing Phon­ ological Surface Forms in the Lexicon". 2 There are seven rules that each apply to one of the seven tone cate­ gories. In our experiments we are concerned only with the five long tones that occur in the 'long syllables', that is, syllables that do not end in -p, -t or -k. Because of complicated dialectal variations in the two short tones that occur in the 'short syllables', that is, syllables ending in -p, -t or —k, the two short tones are not included in our study. 3 Although some common characteristics are observed among these five rules, and although rule schemata in terms of distinctive features of tone can be formulated (cf. Cheng 1968, 1973), we find it more con­ venient in our experiment to treat the change in each tone as being governed by an individual rule rather than by a rule schemata shared by all five tones. 4 This situation can be compared to the type of English compounds as exemplified by blackboard eraser. There, the trisyllabic compound is based on a productive formula but the disyllabic compound is restricted to occur only in such forms as b l a c k b i r d , blackberry or such forms as

surfboard,

billboard.

Other forms such as *blackwall

or

^whiteboard

are not allowed. 5

This situation is comparable to creating the artificial English com­ pound * w h i t e b o a r d on the basis of the real compound b l a c k b o a r d . 6 They were brothers and sister (S2). The parents of these children are native speakers of Taiwanese; they also speak Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and English. These children had lived in the United States for about two years when they took the tests. In varying degrees of fluency, they speak Taiwanese, Mandarin Chinese and English, Taiwanese being their first language. In their daily conversation, the children speak the '33' dialect, although occasionally they show influence from speakers of the '21' dialect. The subjects were tested separately and, whenever possible, without the presence of others. The experimenter (E) is an adult linguist who speaks the '33' dialect as his native language.

7 The child's responses are acknowledged by E and are either marked on a test sheet or recorded by a tape-recorder to be transcribed later. Comments on the correctness of the child's answer are avoided. If a

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HSIN-I HSIEH

child gives more than one answer to a particular item either because he changes his mind or because E wants him to repeat, then the two or more responses are all accepted. - Attempts were made to keep the four tests in the fixed sequence of Test I, Test II, Test III and Test IV but in vain. It is hard to make the children work according to rigid schedule. The interval between every two trials on the same test ranges from one hour to two weeks. 8 Derek Bickerton, observing that five of the nine possible types occur more frequently than others, has suggested (personal communication) that the evolutional types be ordered according to a constraint whereby al­ ternants of morphemes 'produced' by rules applied in the backward direc­ tion are at least as advanced as and at most one step more advanced than alternants ' produced' by the same rules in the forward direction. This constraint is supported by the fact that subjects generally perform better in the backward operation than in the forward operation of rules. Accordingly, such a constraint will yield the following time sequence: Type I. I:I, Type II. I/C, Type V. I/C:l/C, Type VI. I/C:C, and Type IX. C:C. Bickerton's solution has the additional merit of being able to predict the exclusion of type III items from the responses of the subjects. Yet its defect lies in its failure to accommodate types IV, VII, and VIII which occur despite his constraint. 9 The order in which the test items are presented to the subject is as follows: Each of the first ten items of modifiers, 41a-50a, is combined with head-noun I. Following this, each of the second ten items of modi­ fiers, 41b-50b, is extracted from compounds formed with head-noun I. The same process is repeated for head-nouns II, III, IV and V. This completes one trial of the test for a subject. Each subject is asked to make three trials of the test. The interval between each two trials is usually a week but sometimes it is as short as a day or as long as a month. 10

With the exception of S4 who speaks the '21' dialect, all subjects speak the '33' dialect, which is also the dialect the examiner. These subjects are either graduate students or wives of students from Taiwan. 11 Hereafter, she and her mother continued to speak Taiwanese for several years until they finally settled down to a strange way of communication in which she would speak English to her mother and her mother would speak Taiwanese to her. Because of a lack of Taiwanese speakers in her life circle, she normally did not communicate in Taiwanese except with her mother. At an interview prior to the tests, her Taiwanese impressed us as very fluent, though she seemed to be short of literary vocabulary and a socially proper control of the style. 12 Since our experience with SI, S2, and S3 shows that the difference in the head-nouns is not very significant, we used only the head-noun I, tiam 21 "store" in her case. 13 When the overall percentage of correct responses rather than the num­ ber of categorical rules is used as the basis of comparison, the rank­ ing of the four test situations with respect to their susceptibility to application of rules changes slightly to that of forward-fakes, backwardfakes, forward-reals and backward-reals in an ascending order (cf.Table VII.).

141

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142 Kiparsky, Paul. 1971. "Historical Linguistics". A Survey of Linguistic Science ed. by W. 0.. Dingwall, 576-642. College Park, Md.: Univ. of Maryland, Linguistics Program. Koutsoudas, Andreas, Gerald Sanders, and Craig Noll. 1974. "On the Ap­ plication of Phonological Rules". Language 50:1.1-28. Krohn, Robert K. 1972. "The Vowel Shift Rule and its Productivity". Language Sciences 20.17-18. Labov, William. 1969. "Contraction, Deletion, and Inherent Variability of the English Copula". Language 45:3.715-62. Ladefoged, Peter, and Victoria Fromkin. 1968. "Experiments on Compe­ tence and Performance". IEEE Transactions on Audio and Electroacoustics 16:1.130-36. Liao, Chiu-chung. 1971. The Syntactic Environments of the Tone in Taiwanese, M.A. thesis, Taiwan Normal University.

Sandhi

Maher, J. Peter. 1969. "The Paradox of Creation and Tradition in Gram­ mar: Sound pattern of a palimpsest". Language Sciences 7.15-24. Moskowitz, Arlene I. MS, On the Status

of Vowel Shift

in

English,

Ohala, John J. 1973. On the Design of Phonological Experiments, of California, Berkeley; Dept. of Linguistics, mimeo.

Univ.

Ohala, Manjari. 1972. "The Abstractness Controversy: Experimental in­ put from Hindi". Paper presented at the LSA Annual Meeting in At­ lanta, Georgia, Dec. 1972 [like the original version of J. J. Ohala 1973, above]. Steinberg, Danny D. 1973. "Phonology, Reading, and Chomsky and Halle's Optimal Orthography". Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 2:3.239to 258.. Vennemann, Theo. 1972. "Phonological Uniqueness in Natural Generative Grammar". Glossa 6:1.105-16. Wang, William S.-Y. 1967. "Phonological Features of Tone". tional Journal of American Linguistics 33:2.93-105.

Interna­

. 1969. "Competing Changes as a Cause of Residue". Language 45:1.9-25. Zimmer, Karl E. 1969. "Psychological Correlates of Some Turkish Mor­ pheme Structure Conditions". Language 45:2.309-21.

143

APPENDIX

Table II:

Stimuli used in Tests I, II, III, and IV

a) Monosyllabic morphemes used as head-nouns: I. II. III.

tiam 21 "store, shop" pi 55 "side" tsi 35 "money"

IV. V.

tsi 53 "seed" bi 33 "flavor, smell"

b) Real disyllabic compounds used as modifiers to the head-nouns: la. 2a. 3a. 4a. 5a. 6a. 7a. 8a. 9a. 10a. 11a. 12a. 13a. 14a. 15a. 16a. 17a. 18a. 19a. Note:

kin 33 tsiә 55 tshai 53 kue 55 nai 21 tsi 55 si 33 kue 55 en 33 sui 55 kirn 33 kue 55 sek 5 khia 55

"banana" 20a. "squash" 21a. "lichee" 22a. "watermelon" 23a. "parsley" 24a. "pumpkin" 25a. "custard apple" 26a. tang 33 kue 55 "winter-melon" 27a. phang 33 kue 55 "honeydew" 28a. bok 3 kue 55 "papaya" 29a. phu 33 thә 35 "grape" ong 33 lai 35 "pineapple" 30a. iũ 33 thә 35 "star-fruit" 31a. tshai 53 thau 35 "radish" leng 33 keng 53 "dragon-eye" 32a. lai 33 a 53 "pear" 33a. le 33 bong 53 "lemon" kam 33 a 53 "orange" 34a. phong 21  53 "apple" 35a. In the tests, items both in b) and c) are arranged so that no tvo items of the same tone appear in a sequence.

36a. 37a. 38a. 39a. 40a.

iu 33 a 53 tek 5 sun 53 the 33 a 53 li 55 a 53 suāi 33 a 55 pe 21 tshai 21

"grapefruit" "bamboo shoot" "peach" "plum" "mango" "Chinese cabbage" hue 33 tshai 21 "cauliflower" eng 53 tshai 21 "watercress" ku 55 tshai 21 "chives" kua 53 tshai 21 "mustard green" tau 21 tshai 21"bean sprouts" len 55 bu 33 "Taiwanese apple" tho 33 tau 33 "peanut" ang 33 khi 33 "red persimmon" ang 33 tau 33 "red pea" tsui 55 khi 33 "yellow per­ simmon" lek 3 tau 33 "green pea" huan 33 be 33 "corn" tshan 33 tau 33 "kidney bean" bin 55 tau 33 "bean" ng 33 tau 33 "yellow pea"

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HSIN-I HSIEH

c) Artificial disyllabic compounds used as modifiers to the head-nouns:

lb. tshai 53 tsiә 55 2b. lek 3 kue 55 3b. pe 21 tsi 55 4b. tho 33 kue 55 5b. tho 33 sui 55 6b. iu 53 kue 55 7b. kim 33 khia 55 8b. tsa 55 kue 55 9b. iü 33 kue 55 10b. l1b. 12b. 13b. 14b. 15b. 16b. 17b.

18b 19b. 20b.

21b. 22b.

23b 24b. 25b. 26b. 27b. 28b. 29b. 30b. 31b. 32b. 33b. 34b. 35b. 36b. 37b. 38b. 39b. 40b.

bi 55 kue 55 iu 53 thә 35 gu 33 lai 35 hue 55 thә 35 hue 33 thau 35 ho 55 keng 53  55  53 tsui 55 bong 53 hok 5 a 53 tshiu 55  53 niü 33 a 53

iû 33 sun 53 sin 33 a 53 tang 33 a 53 tsiu 55 a 53 tshiu 55 tshai 21 gu 33 tshai 21 bi 55 tshai 21 ba 5 tshai 21 tía 55 tshai 21 hue 55 tshai 21 tsui 55 bu 33 hue 55 tau 33 pe 21 khi 33 leng 33 tau 33 hue 55 khi 33 ai 53 tau 33 tiong 33 be 33 huât 5 tau 33 tsa 55 tau 33 kin 33 tau 33

* * * * *

Table IV: Artificial trisyllabic morphemes used as modifiers in the four-syllable compounds in the forward (a) and backward (b) operations. The tone sequence for these modifiers is 33-33-X. The last syllables, being actual, are annotated. a) 41a. 42a. 43a. 44a. 45a. 46a. 47a. 48a. 49a. 50a.

phala-hue 55 thala-hue 35 khala-hue 53 mala-hue 21 nala-hue 33 phala-teng 55 thala-teng 33 khala-teng 53 mala-teng 21 nala-teng 33

"flower" b) "turn" (noun) "fire" "goods" "meeting" "lantern" "layer" "top" (noun) "to hammer" "hard to break"

* * * * *

41b. 42b. 43b. 44b. 45b. 46b. 47b. 48b. 49b. 50b.

phala-kau 33 thala-kau 33 khala-kau 55 mala-kau 53 nala-kau 21 phala-tseng 33 thala-tseng 33 khala-tseng 55 mala-tseng 53 nala-tseng 21

"furrow" "monkey" "dog" "religion" "thick" "bell" "emotion" "seed" "to plant" "quiet"

RULE-APPLICATION IN PRE-GENERATIVE AMERICAN PHONOLOGY* MICHAEL KENSTOWICZ

0.0. One of the major differences between generative phonology and earlier approaches to 'process' phonology/morphophonemics is the heavy reliance upon rule ordering in the generative approach and the virtual absence of this device in the latter (Bloomfield's "Menomini Morphophonemics" [1939] being a well known exception). This is all the more remarkable when it is remembered that in many of these earlier descriptions the underlying forms are just as distant from the surface, and the relationships between the rules are just as intricate, as that found in most generative analyses. Two interpretations of this differ­ ence between earlier approaches and more recent generative studies are possible: either (1) the earlier phonologists implicitly assumed the device of rule ordering, the lack of any explicit discussion of the matter merely being consonant with the general lack of interest in de­ veloping an explicit theory of phonology/morphophonemics; or, alterna­ tively (2) they had a different conception (largely implicit) of how rules interact in the conversion of base forms into phonemic/phonetic representations. In this paper, I will examine the approach to rule application that is implicit in some of the most important descriptions of this pe­ riod of American linguistics, i.e., before the advent of 'item and ar* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Conference on Rule Ordering held in Bloomington, Indiana, in April 1973.

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MICHAEL KENSTOWICZ

rangement' analysis. I will suggest that the conception of rule appli­ cation implicit in most of these earlier studies is significantly simi­ lar to the position recently sketched in Kisseberth 1973a, according to which (1) the sequencing of the rules in a derivation is governed by a principle of 'minimal opacity'; and (2) most nontransparent rule appli­ cations are described in terms of global conditions. 1.0. The first description I shall discuss is Bloomfield's (1887to 1949) "Menomini Morphophonemics" of 1939, since his approach to rule application is virtually identical to that most commonly employed in generative phonology (e.g., Postal 1968) and stands in sharp contrast to the more prevalent treatment of the question during the period under discussion. Bloomfield sought, as far as possible, to provide each morpheme with a unique underlying form from which all of its various surface re­ alizations could be predicted by a maximally general and economical set of rules: The process of description leads us to set up each morphological element in a theoretical basic form, and then to state the devia­ tions from this basic form which appear when the element is com­ bined with other elements. If one starts with the basic forms and applies our statements (§§10 and following) in the order in which we give them, one will arrive finally at the form of the words as they are actually spoken (Bloomfield 1939:105-06).

Thus, for Bloomfield, as for generative phonologists, the underlying representation is converted into the phonetic representation by a se­ quential application of rules, where the sequencing of the rules is controlled by the ordering.1 In other words, whether or not a rule applies to a representation is determined not only by whether that re­ presentation appears in the requisite context, but also by the relative position of the rule in the ordering. More specifically, any given rule 1

Bloomfield does not use rule ordering in his descriptions of Tagalog (1917) and Fox (1925), and thus seems to have adopted this device on­ ly in the later part of his career. The rule numbers in our discus­ sion of Bloomfield are his.

RULE-APPLICATION IN PRE-GENERATIVE AMERICAN PHONOLOGY

147

ri may be applied only after all preceding rules in the ordering have been tried, and once rļ has applied and the next rule rj' is tried, ri may not be tried again. The overall goal of Bloomfield's "Menornini Morphophonemics" was to achieve a maximally economical and general statement of rules (cf. Bever 1967). It is clear that the particular ordering Bloomfield imposed on his rules achieves this overall economy to a significant degree. How­ ever, he used ordering for a number of subpurposes which, as we shall see, would be considered distinct phenomena by linguists approaching the problem of rule interaction from a different point of view. For example, Bloomfield employed rule ordering in order to permit a rule to apply not only to the underlying representation, but also to a representation that results from the application of another rule (a 'feeding' relationships, according to Kiparsky 1968). For instance, he formulates a Palatalization rule (13) which converts t to  and n to s before e, ē, and y. This rule takes underlying pe?t-e "by error" to pe?c-e (ultimately, surface pe?c by other rules, see below). Another rule (10) inserts a 'connective e' in roughly the context  +C. If the preceding morpheme ends in a t, it is regularly palatalized to 5: basic pyεt- 'hither' + -m "by speech" → pyzcem (ultimately ic-εw "he calls him hither"). Bloomfield accounts for this situation by ordering the Palatalization rule after Epenthesis, so that the former rule may oper­ ate before basic e as well as before epenthetic e. It is obvious that if the Palatalization rule were not permitted to operate before epen­ thetic , but was defined instead to operate upon the basic morphophonemic representation, then the rule would have to be written in a more complex form so that it would palatalize t not only before e, but also before a morpheme-initial consonant. Allowing Palatalization to apply before basic as well as before epenthetic e's by the device of rule ordering achieved the simplicity of statement that Bloomfield sought. To cite just one more example of this type, rule (29) lengthens vowels in monosyllabic words: e.g., mw-:ekw "the other eats him" is con­ verted to mok by other rules and is then lengthened to  Apocope

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MICHAEL KENSTOWICZ

(24) converts basic āsetε to aset

"in return" (cf. asetε-hsem-ew

"he

lays them to overlap"). Since two-syllable words which lose their final vowel show up with a long vowel, Bloomfield orders the monosyllabic lengthening rule after Apocope; thus, pe?c-e (from basic pε?t-e) pε?c by Apocope, and then

becomes

pε?c.

Cases in which the outputs of one rule ri,- do not undergo another rule r i , even though the structural description of r-¡ is met, are han­ dled by ordering ri before rj (a 'non-feeding' relation, following Kiparsky 1968). For example, recall that the Palatalization rule (13) takes t to  before y: Netyanw-

becomes neoyanw (ultimately, nicyan

"child"). But there are instances of ty sequences on the phonetic sur­ face. Rather than treat them as exceptions, and hence complicate the description, Bloomfield sets up a w between the t and the y; this w is then deleted by an independently motivated rule (16) which drops the first of two semi-vowels after a consonant: pehcekonahtyan

"sacred

bundle, pl.", which is set up as basic pēnt-ēkon-ahtwy-an.

The Glide

Dropping rule is, of course, ordered after the Palatalization rule so that the latter does not convert t to  before yls

that come to stand

immediately before t as a result of Glide Dropping. And, as far as I have been able to determine, this is the only reason for ordering Glide Drop after Palatalization. Ordering is also used to deal with cases in which a rule applies in a nonphonetic context (a 'nonbleeding' relation, cf. again Kiparsky 1968). For example, recall the pε/c comes from basic pe?t-e.

In the der­

ivation of this form, Palatalization (13) must be applied before Apocope (24), for otherwise, the e which conditions the conversion of t to  would be lost. We have seen how Bloomfield employed ordering to achieve a simpli­ fication in the statement of his rules. However, there is one case in his "Menomini Morphophonemics" in which the device of ordering has the opposite effect. This becomes evident when rules (12) and (23) are compared. Rule (12) describes what happens to clusters of C+C which, exceptionally, fail to receive an epenthetic e by (10):

RULE-APPLICATION IN PRE-GENERATIVE AMERICAN PHONOLOGY

149

In such forms if the first consonant is other than n it is replaced by h: sēnak-at-k: sēnakāhk-en 'whenever it is difficult1, sēnakah 'whenever it was difficult1; cf. sanākat fit is difficult' ; ..(Bloomfield 1939:109).

In sēnakah, from basic sēnak-at-k, t is replaced by h by (12), and the resultant cluster hk is simplified in final position to h by rule (25), which drops consonants in cluster until only one is left. Rule (23) sim­ ply states (p.113): "Clusters of n plus consonant are replaced by h plus consonant." In other words, (23) is the missing part of (12). Bloomfield does not state why these two rules cannot be combined. In fact, he does not even remark upon their similarity. However, it is possible to reconstruct, at least partially, why he was forced to de­ scribe these rules as separate. The rule immediately preceding (23), i. e., rule (22), replaces e by e before n plus consonant. Examples are: pakam-εnt — 2 2 → pakam-ent —23—> pakam-eht — 2 5 → pakam-eh "if he is struck" εn-εnt — 2 2 → εnent — 2 3 → εneht — 2 5 → εneh "if he is called so" kε-set-εns-an — 2 2 → kεsetens-an --23→ kesetehsan "thy toes"

Note that in the last two examples, t and n appear before e. Recall that Palatalization (13) converts t and n to 5 and s before e. Thus, Palatali­ zation must be ordered before (22). Furthermore, (22) must precede (23), for there are many examples of surface phonetic ehc sequences (e.g., mεhkam "he finds it", apεhsos "deer", etc.). But rule (12) is ordered before Palatalization.2 If (23) were to be combined with (12), this would mean that (22) would have to precede Palatalization. But with such an ordering it would not be possible to block Palatalization in cases such as kesetehsan "thy toes", for (22) would have merged the contrast between ε and e. As we shall see, the more prevalent approach to rule application during this period would be able to overcome the difficulty examples like this present in a rule ordering framework. I have not been able to determine why (12) must precede (13). If this is unnecessary, then it may be possible to escape from the ordering paradox by imposing the following sequencing of the rules: (13), (22), (12-23).

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MICHAEL KENSTOWICZ

2.0. I will now turn to a rather different conception of rule ap­ plication, one which is much more characteristic of the approach taken to morphophonemics in the United States before the advent of the 'item and arrangement' analyses of the 1940's and 50's. I shall begin with a brief examination of the approach to rule ap­ plication taken by Edward Sapir (1884-1939), the most outstanding prac­ titioner of morphophonemics during this period. Sapir's approach is perhaps best exemplified in his descriptions of Takelma (1922) and Southern Paiute (1930). Although written at different points in his ca­ reer, these analyses take the same basic approach to phonology. Like Bloomfield, Sapir conceived of morphemes as having (generally) a unique underlying form (the 'primary' or 'organic' form, in Sapir's terminol­ ogy), which can be modified by phonological rules, depending upon the contexts in which they appear. The phonological rules have the effect of altering the underlying form to produce a 'non-primary' or 'inorganic' form, which may be phonetically identical with the primary form of an­ other word. Unlike Bloomfield, however, Sapir does not evidence any con­ ception of an imposed ordering of the rules as they apply to transform the underlying representation into the surface phonetic shape. But this does not mean that for Sapir the rules provided a 'direct mapping' between the underlying and surface representations, i.e., that all rules are defined to operate on the underlying level ('simultaneous application', in the sense of Postal 1968). On the contrary, there are many examples in the Takelma and Southern Paiute descriptions which show that Sapir considered the underlying representation to be converted into the phonetic representation by a sequential application of rules. How­ ever, the sequencing of his rules is not imposed by rule ordering state­ ments. In the Takelma grammar, for example, Sapir formulates a general rule which deaspirates intervocalic consonants if the immediately pre­ ceding vowel is unaccented. Such a rule accounts for numerous alterna­ tions, such as that exhibited by the 1st per.sg. suffix in words like phelxà-thê "I shall go to war", and phélêxa^de-? "I go to fight". This

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151

rule interacts with another rule by which h is absorbed into a preced­ ing stop, aspirating it if it is unaspirated: i.e., for the velar se­ ries, for example, g or kh + h -+ kh. As Sapir (1922:43-44) notes, "Un­ der suitable conditions of accent the contraction product kh or fc^may itself become g or gw so that all trace of the original h seems to be lost." One of the examples of the h-loss process that he cites is the form gUen-hekK)agw"relate", from basic hegw-hagw, a reduplicated root in which the stem vowel is replaced by a. A related form of this root is also cited in which the accent appears on the reduplicated material: gwen-hegwagw-an-i "tell to". Here we see that Sapir clearly assumes a sequential derivation in which the Deaspiration rule applies to the out­ put of h-Absorption: heg w heg w -hág w hek h w -ag w heg w -ag w

root Reduplication h-A'bsorption Deaspiration

Another more striking example of sequential application is to be found in the Southern Paiute analysis. Under the section entitled "Vo­ calic Contraction", Sapir formulates a rule whereby a+i and a+u con­ tract into the diphthongs ai and au. He then states: An au, itself usually contracted from a + u, is sometimes further contracted to a before qw nw, or p the labial vowel  being ab­ sorbed, as it were, into the following labialized consonant but leaving its quantitative value behind in the lengthening of the preceding a (Sapir 1930:17).

One of the examples Sapir cites to illustrate this process is nauq winqiThe former representation is "to fight", which surfaces as na-q'winqi. said to come from underlying *na-yuq -wi--, with reference to a sec­ tion in which a rule deleting intervocalic  is formulated. Here, then, is an example of the sequential application of three rules, each ap­ plication creating an input to the next rule: na-γuq-wi-nqi na-uq'wi-riqi nauq w i - n q i na q w i n q i

underlying Y → é Contraction u--Absorption

152

MICHAEL KENSTOWICZ

An important point to note here is that, in both this example and the preceding one from Takelma, the rules which apply to the outputs created by applications of previous rules are also permitted to apply to the underlying representation as well. Thus, the rule contracting a +  to the diphthong au applies to primary a+  as well as to a +  clusters created by the loss of y. Similarly, in the Takelma example, the Deaspiration rule applies to basic intervocalic aspirates as well as to those created by the h-Absorption process. Thus, Sapir, like Bloomfield, allows for sequential rule application to deal with 'feeding' re­ lationships. However, unlike Bloomfield, for Sapir the sequencing of rules in a derivation is not controlled by rule ordering, for nowhere in the Takelma or Southern Paiute grammars (as well as in any of his other writings, as far as I know) are there to be found statements of the form "rule x must always be applied before rule y". But if the se­ quencing of the rules is not controlled by the device of ordering, how then are the correct derivations ensured? Although, to my knowledge, Sapir never explicitly discussed this question, it is my impression that he assumed (at least for 'feeding' relationships) what might be called a 'free application' principle to the effect that a rule applies every time its structural description is met. My chief reason for believing this is the manner in which Sapir states his rule, each rule is formulated in such a way that it does not make reference to the other. Thus, in the Takelma example where h-Absorption feeds Deaspiration, Sapir's formulation (and discussion) of the latter rule makes no mention of h-Absorption. Similarly, in his formal statement of h-Absorption, nothing is said about the effects of other rules upon the output of this rule: When standing immediately after a stop, an organic etymologically significant h loses its individuality as such and unites with a preceding media [voiced stop] or aspirated tenuis [voiceless stop] to form an aspirated tenuis (Sapir 1930:43).

It is true that after this formal statement of the rule he remarks: Under suitable conditions of accent (see §23) [where 23 refers to the place in which Deaspiration is formulated] the contraction

RULE-APPLICATION IN PRE-GENERATIVE AMERICAN PHONOLOGY

153

product h or may itself become g or gw so that all trace of the original h seems to be lost (43-44).

However, I do not think that this remark is to be taken as a condition on the application of the rules; rather, it is to be interpreted as an 'aside', explicating the structure of the words in which the application of h-Absorption is obscured by another rule. Similarly, in the Southern Paiute example just discussed, the Contraction rule is formulated sim­ ply as a +  > au (Sapir 1930:17), with no mention of whether or not the a +  sequence is basic, or derived by another rule. Also, the process by which  is absorbed into a following labial is formulated in such a way that the derivational source of the diphthongs is not relevant to the application of the rule. If this interpretation is correct, it means that unlike Bloomfield, who described feeding interactions by rule ordering, Sapir ensures such rule interactions by a general principle of 'free application'. This does not mean, however, that Sapir excluded the possibility of 'nonfeeding' or 'anti-feeding' relationships, a position espoused by Koutsoudas, Sanders, and Noll (1971). On the contrary, the recognition of opaque applications was one of the most distinctive traits of Sapir's work. Non-feeding interactions are made consistent with his implicit principle of free application, because in such circumstances Sapir gen­ erally formulated his rules in terms of the derivational source of the segment undergoing or conditioning the rule. This becomes clear when it is remembered that the terms 'organic' and 'primary' versus 'inorganic' and 'secondary' are technical terms for Sapir, referring roughly to the underlying representation versus representations resulting from the application of some phonological rule. For example, in his discussion of the Takelma accents Sapir notes the essential equivalence between a rising accent (marked with a cir­ cumflex), which only occurs on long vowels and diphthongs, and a simple 'raised' accent (marked by the grave sign), which appears only on shortened diphthongs and final short vowels, compare Sapir (1930:17): "The rising pitch is for a long vowel or diphthong what the raised

154

MICHAEL KENSTOWICZ

pitch is for a short vowel or a shortened diphthong." In other words, the circumflex and the grave accents are really one and the same accent; the former is limited to long syllables, while the latter occurs on short syllables. Sapir then goes on to note one important point regard­ ing the accent in diphthongs. This involves a rule of Epenthesis which inserts a in the context  CC: It is very important to distinguish between the organic diphthongs, in which each element of the diphthong has a distinct radical or etymological value, and secondary diphthongs arising from an i, u, or n with prefixed inorganic a. The secondary diphthongs l, , (ai, au, l, am, an), being etymologically single vowels, are al­ ways unitonal in character; they can have the raised, not the ris­ ing accent. Contrast the inorganic au of

bilaûkh

(