oars phy TRANSFORMATIONAL SYNTAX A STUDENT'S GUIDE TO CHOMSKY'S EXTENDED STANDARD THEORY ANDREW RADFORD cAMBRIDG KogveIh ye PS of Urey of ee ret sh Se, New Yr ba, USA Ye eel any Mi ot Mee oc Aue (© cates Unnny Pe ih it paid tht apd 2s hyo Cnr ci cr ube Bess ‘ei Lay aa ie a ‘Tema tn, = (Ca ‘ects ng) Eh ee Gone ‘oe fr oh jr CONTENTS Preface Goats Further reading Structure Further reading bar Syntax Exercise Further reading “The Lexicon Exercises Further reading “Transformations Bere Farther reading ‘More on transformations Exercises, Farther reading Constraints Exerc asthe reading Deletion Eeercce Farther reading age vit a a a a 1 4s 46 ™ ™ to as a6 a7Contents 9 Filters Bec Farther reading ae Case Evercise Farther reading Binding Exereioes asthe ecding Suggested essay questions Biography Index page 283 v1 x on a4 yo so iw us 6 PREFACE “The aim of this book isto provide a clear, simple introdvetion to recent work in Syntax by Chomaky and hi followers, fr all hose ‘who find Chomsky unintelligible. In an obvious sense, tis an Introdtion to works like his Essays on Form and Interpretation (1977). ‘Filters and Conteo’ (1977, with H. Lasnik), “On Wh- Movement’ (3977), Rules and Representations (1980), "On Bind ing’ (1980), ‘Markedness and Core Grammar (180), Pisa Lectures (tof) and ‘On the representation of form and function’ (2080), Setting yourself such a gal raises @ number of questions. Let me tay and answer them. “Why concentrate on Chomsky’ work,’ you might ak, ‘rather than including detailed discussion of alternative models such a3 those developed by Brame, Bresnan, Guzdar and others?"There ae several answers to this question. One is that Chomsky isthe name that everyone associates with TG, Chomky is the oly linguist you are ever likely to see on television, Chomsky isthe one linguist ‘whose work is widely known in neighbouring disciplines like Peychology and Philosophy, and Chomsky is the primary lingwist, that students want to know about. Asacond reason i that much of the work described here is ofan extraordinary technical complex: ity: presenting this in a form in which it will be intelligible to beginners i in itself a major undertaking, and leaves no room for discussion of equally complex research by others, ‘But why concentrate on Chomsky’s recent work, instead of tracing the istrial development of his work over the past three ‘decades? Firs, to concentrate on the past twenty-five years rather than the past ive years would have meant curtaling discussion of more recent work to such an extent that either I would have ad fo ‘omit any discussion of certain ideas, or I would have had to makePreface the presentation much more dense, and therefore less readily intelligible. Secondly, the past five years hat sen a major theoreti al reorientation in ais, methods, terminology, argumentation and fe forth ~ to such an extent that itis no longer clear that reading yesterday's Linguistics helps you understand today’s Linguistics (on the contrary, many students find the histricist approach tiresome, and bevrildering). In any ease, there ae already endless introductions to early work in TG on the market including Bach, ‘Syntactic Theory (3974), Akiajian and Heng, Principles (1973), Huddleston, Intreduction (1976), Culicover, Syntax (1977), Bal cr, Intraduction (2978), Jacobsen, TC Grammar (3978), and Perlmutter and Soames, Arpumentation (r979) ~ why waste good ink writing another textbook that's years ut of date before i's printed? But why not give s critical evaluation of Chomy’s recent work, atleast” Well, ertical evaluation of «theory presupposes thatthe reader understands the theory in the Firs place. But to tuippose that anyone other than the very brightest PRD student ould ead ‘On Binding’ or the iba Lectures by himself and digest, the ideas is naive in the exteme, What is needed first isa clear, simaple exposition of the theory: the first stage in being able to ‘rteise theory i tobe abe to understand it! And what this book ‘secks todo ito develop ia the reader abasic understanding of the ‘ews and ideas of Chomsky and his followers; the reader should then beable to go on and read for himself some of the works cited. Only after that docs it make sense to tak about attempting to make ‘scritcl evaluation ofthe theory. And that would be the subject for ‘another, very different kind of book have designed the book to be used with a variety of different students for courses at a variety of different levels. For the boginning student, chapters 1-5 provide a basie introduction to "TG syntax; for an intermediate course, chapters 3-9 would be useful and for an advanced course on recent work, chapters 3 and ‘6-11 provide invaluable preparatory reading and practice material Which should enable the student to go on to read the primary literature (.. the orginal source material). ‘The tet is sequenced in such a way that the student can ‘stop’ at any point beyond ‘chapter g, and still have covered a reasonably coherent st of ides Tahould also say something about the Exercises atthe end of each rl Preface chapter. ‘These are an integral part of the text (i. it would be foolish to ‘skip’ them), and are'of three types: (i) reinforcement exercises (which give the reader practice a¢ applying the ideas iscused in the text); (i) advancement exerciaes (which serve to introduce new concepts and terminology which wil be presupposed in the rest of the text: these are marked by a prefixed single ‘terse *); and (Gi) problem exercises (orich attempt to get the ead to Took eather more exitclly at some of the assumptions, ‘rguments and analyses given in the text; these are marked with « prefixed double asterisk) Td like to thank a numberof friends and collegues forthe ‘encouragement, helpful dicussion, eriical comments and so on — ‘specially Michael Anthony, Bob Borsey, Memo Cingue, Jacques Durand, Frank Heny, Givlio Lepechy, Peter Matthews, Frank Palmer, Deirdre Wilson and Nigel Vincent. Lack of time and energy has meant that I have been unable to take account of the ‘more radial revisions that they proposed. Special thanks ae due to the Press for agreeing to take the manuscript in ite original rmimeographed form, and for making an efor to publish it sooner than possible! Finally let me add that this book is dedicated to the person who did more than anyone to awaken my iteret in language, and to persuade me that just maybe Finguistic theory wasn't quite as pointless a it seemed at the time ~ Joe Cremona. Andrew Radford October 1980Goals ‘Why stay language? For Chomsky, the answers that language mirror of the mind ~ i.e. by detailed stdy of language, we might Ihope to reach a better understanding of how the human mind produces and processes language. As Chomsky himself remarks ‘There ae a number of questions that might lad one 10 underale study of language. Personally, Tam pean Intrigued by the possibilty of leering something, from the ‘uy of langue hat wil rng ight inherent proper of ‘he Boman mind (Chomsky, Language and Mind (972, p13) Chomsky secks to attain two parallel, interrelated goals in the study ‘of language ~ namely to develop () a Theory of Language, and (i) 4 Theory of Language Acquistion. "The Theory of Language will concern itself with what are the defining characteristic of natural ((e- human) languages, and the Theory of Language Acquisition ‘wth the question of how children acquire their native langage) ‘Of the two, the ask () of developing a Theory of Language is ~ in| ‘Chomsky’ view ~ logically prior tothe task (i) of developing « ‘Theory of Language Acquisition, since only if we fret know what language is can we develop theories about how it ix acquired; ‘moreover, we shall see shortly that a Theory of Language isan important subpart of the Theory of Language Acquisition that Chomaky seks to develop. So, the primary aim of Linguistics, for Chomsky, isto develop ‘Theory of Language. But what is it that such 2 theory seeks to ‘characterise? ‘The answers that any adequate ‘Theory of Language ‘must provide answers to questions such as the following: ‘What i language? ‘What ie that ou know when you know a language?+ Goals What are the cuenti defining caracternics of natural languages which diferetate them from eg aes lan fase ike tone wed in Mathematie or Computing, or Shr lorem of communication? Do lingges ifr ftom each eer unpredictable way, o ‘do the ll share certain common, univer propria? But how do we attempt to develop a Theory of Language which wil answer auch questions? ‘The first step ts to formulate detailed Sescriptions (known technically as grammars) of paticular lan- guages (eg. English): this isthe study of Particular Grammar. "The second step is to abstract from particular grammars common, universal properties that they all share: this is the study of Universal Grammar ~ ie. the search for linguistic univers ‘Consider firt the study of Particular Grammar. What is 2 grammar of a particular language? Chon gives an essentially ‘mentalist answer to this question: for hi, a grammar i model ‘systematic description) of those linguistic abilities of the mative ‘speaker of language which enable him to speak and understand is language fluent. ‘These linguistic abilities, Chomsky terms the ‘competence ofthe native speaker. Thus, a grammar ofa language is {@ model ofthe linguistic competence ofthe fluent native speaker of ‘the language. Competence (the fluent native speaker's knowledge of his language) ie contrasted by Chomsky with Performance (what people actualy say or understand by what someone else says on a fiven occasion): competence is'the apeaker-heare's knowledge of his language’, while performance is the actual use of language in concrete situations’ (Chomsky, Aspects (1965), p. 4) Very often, petformance is an imperfect reflection of competence: eg the fact that people make occasional ‘lips of the tongue’ in everyday ‘oaversation does not mean that they don't know thei language, or don’t have fluency (ie. competence) in it. “Sip of the tongue and Tike phenomena are ~ for Chomsky ~ performance error, attrib able to a variety of performance factors like tiredness, boredom, DEG ~ ADV pee Ne {9 Neo bere (§ = CliceSetens; NP = Noun Phe; AUX = Aiiay; Vpn Vee Pires Y= Neby ADVE = hye Pooe PP ~ Prepon Phrases DEG = Dope avert ADV = River P = Pepntinn; DBP = Deter coon ‘none peeing) (21) [yp this bo ux wil [yp speak very sly otha gil) (Un what respect ie (21) not quite exactly equivalent to (20)2) ‘Generally speaking, linguists tend to se tre-diagrams (P-markers) {ora Tul representation of the syntactic stueture of a sentence (ecause at that level of detail, they are eater read) and labelled bracketings for a partial representation of structure (because they ‘occupy les space on the printed page). But recall thatthe two ‘jaime of representation are logically equivalent (whatever struc: ture cam be represented in the one system can be represented inthe ‘other, and vice-versa), s0 the question of whether you adopt one of ‘the other is entirely & matter of typographical convenience, not 2 matter of any theoretical significance. Accordingly, we shall we both systems frely in our discussions here aileron, we suid thatthe syntactic component of a grammar ‘comprises ast of sentence formation rules which have two tasks 0 fulfil: via, (2) (0) and (i) above; that i () specify which sequences ‘of words form grammatical sentences in language, and (i) specily| the internal syntactic structure of such sentences, We have now ‘seen that the surface syntactic structure of a sentence can be represented in the form of a tree-diagram or Pemarker like (17) Accordingly, we might reformulate the goal of the syatacic Given the gloss a the foot of (22), rle (23) (8) canbe regarded as specifying "You can form a Clase by taking « Noun Phrase immediately followed by an Auxiliary immediately followed by 2 ‘Verb Phrase.” More formally, we ean say that rule (aa) (a) will generate the partial tre-structure (23) below: eo 5 aa NB Aux WP __ Rule (22) (b) specifies that we can form a Verb Phrate by taking & Verb immediatly followed by an Adverbial Phrase immediately _ followed by a Prepostional Phrase: i. trom (23) by application of ‘ule (22) (b) we ean generate: ro *2 Structure eo s. ——t eater = vO apve ep Rule (22) (c) specifies that we can form an Adverbal Phrase by taking a Degree Adverb followed by an Adverb; applying this ule to the structure (24), we expand (24) into: 2 Structure rit of all the words in the language. And let us further assume thatthe Lexical Entry (= dictionary entry) fr each such Levieal fom (~ word) contains (in addition to other information) penficaton of the syntactic category that the word belongs to. For ‘resent purposes, we might imagine that our Lexicon contains {ter alia) the following entries co) es s Ni atx vp — i vo apye pe itr DE, 7 Sip. BiG, Ap) suill, AUX, ‘ale (22) (4) specifies chat we can form a Prepostinal Phrase out ofa Preposition immediately followed by a Noun Phrase; applying tule (22) (2) tothe structure (25) will give us 6 s ——T NF atx Sp — vy apye Pr [And finaly, let us also postulate a Lexical Insertion Rule by which ‘ny lexical tem (= word) belonging toa given lexical category (ie, tword-ategory lke N, V, P, ADV, ete, a8 opposed to Phrasal Categories Tike NP, VP, 'PP, ADVP, ete.) can be inserted in a structure lke (27) under the corresponding eategory ~ e.g. any N (= Noun) canbe inserted under N, any V (= Verb) under V, any ADV (= Adverb) under ADV, and so forth. Given such a Lexical | Iasrton Rule, we can insert e g this under the fit DET in (27), ‘oy under the first N ell under AUX, speak under V, very unde DEG, sy under ADV, to under P, that under the second DET, and girl under the second N, thereby deriving from (27) the Serta Structure (29) vie aby Ye Rule (23) (e) says that we can form a Noun Phrase by taking Determiner immediately followed by « Noun; if we apply thie ule twexpand both the Noun Phrases in (26), we derive the structure: c A en s ” ji ae ee aa 7 a I pir No owit V ADye PP. vi apy 7 Y BN th nD Mv NR vm ABV Np ee A TAN LY very dowly © DET ON vé " Y ‘Let's now assume that in addition to the Categoria Rules (22) - ar) ice. rules expanding categories into other categories ~ the syntactic component of our grammar aio contains a Lesicon (= dictionary), ‘Ths, we ste that a set of Categoria Rules like (22) (which specity how categories ae formed out of other categories), together with 3 ae 8