Abstract
This section will be devoted to the question of how polycategorial lexical attachment is supposed to take place in the case of underlying structures of the type proposed in the preceding chapter.
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According to the view presented in Gruber (1967a), however, no order reversal takes place where it is not apparent in the morphemic order. But I think it will simplify a grammar if we need not state in any way in every specific case whether or not order reversal is to take place. As is pointed out on pp. 127–8, it may be preferable for productive affixes to have lexical entries whose simultaneous environments include categorial variables or unspecified categories representing the classes of morphemes to which affixes are connected, rather than to postulate incomplete lexical items which after having been connected with other lexical items are attached to the derived tree, as Gruber proposes. This means that we could introduce another type of incomplete’ lexical entries for affixes which could reverse the order of the affix node or nodes and the as yet unlexicalized string of categories matching the categorial variables or unspecified categories within the simultaneous environment (without affecting the order within the latter string). Thus if A is the node underlying the affix and X the node underlying the phonological string to which the affix is to be connected, where the prelexical order is A X, the entry will change the order into X A, and lexicalize A. A further entry, applied afterwards, will then lexicalize X. Thus order reversal as it is apparent in words consisting of two morphemes will not be the result of attaching the polymorphemic word in stages, since order reversal will already have taken place during lexicalization of A. If X is a string of two or more nodes (where X corresponds to a string variable in the simultaneous environment), only the order of A X will be reversed during the first stage, while a further entry (or further entries) will reverse the order within X.
Since objects are either abstract or concrete, we might therefore, in a less sketchy proposal, do away with either the category ABSTR or the category CONCR. A probably apparent counterexample, also cited by Gruber, with respect to the claim that there are no selectional restrictions requiring the class of animate non-human nouns is the German word fressen (= Dutch vreten), which means the same as essen (eat) except for fressen occurring, as a rule, with subjects referring to animals. But, as McCawley (1971) correctly observes, “it is not clear that [essen and fressen] refer to the same kind of eating (which verb do you use in reporting a well-mannered chimpanzee’s eating something with a knife and fork?)” (op. cit., p. 290).
An argument which seems to support the idea that ‘non-particular’ units do not occur in MP’s with underlying indefinite articles is the fact that sentences containing covert indefinite articles like Hij leest (geen) boeken (‘He reads (no) books’) correspond to er constructions of the type Er zijn (geen) boeken die hij leest (There are (no) books which he reads’), while a sentence like Hij weegt (geen) 80 kilo (‘He weighs (no) 80 kilo’) does not correspond to *Er is/zijn (geen) 80 kilo (’s) die hij weegt (There is/are (no) 80 kilo(s) which he weighs’).
Gruber (ibid.) notes that “unrecoverable deletion may be avoidable if we simply allow the generation of a noun phrase under the REL as well as a full sentence, and then allow this to have a complete ambiguous interpretation.” However, as we shall see, an unrecoverable deletion of the type that Gruber’s rather unsatisfactory proposal may require can also be avoided in other ways, although these do not account for the putative fact that the expressions John’s book, a book of John’s, the book of John, etc., do not only have the reading “the/a book which John has.” They could, according to Gruber, have readings like “the/a book which John read”, “the/a book which John saw,” or “wrote,” or “burned,” or “threw a pebble at.” It seems to me that if we want to avoid a mind-boggling set of recoverable rules relating these expressions to John’s book, etc., we could interpret Gruber’s list of possible readings as part of the class of things that may be referred to by the expression the/a book which John is (in some way) associated with, which may be taken to correspond to the structure underlying John’s book, etc., thus granting that the latter is “ambiguous”, albeit not homonymous.
See p. 157.
Cf. Wunderlich (1970), where constructions of this type having the form van + MP (or rather, von + MP, since he uses German examples) are also transformationally related to bedragen (German: betragen). Underlying bedragen is a string of the form BE WITH DET VAL AT, which is a string that will be yielded by RELATIVE CLAUSE REDUCTION applied twice to XLIII.
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© 1972 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland
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Klooster, W.G. (1972). The Derivation of MP Sentences. In: The Structure Underlying Measure Phrase Sentences. Foundation of Language, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2890-5_3
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