Re: THEORY: two questions

And Rosta wrote:

>> >Surely not, because it doesn't apply to English:
>> >
>> >   I wonder who ate bread and what.
>> >   According to modern chemistry, lead and which other element are
>>dangerous
>> >     when inhaled?
>>
>> I find the first of your example sentences ungrammatical.
>
>I wonder why that is.
>
>How about:
>    We wondered who and Madonna would make a nice couple.
Atrocious!  :-)

>> The second one is good, though.  It's been noted that echo questions (a.k.a.
>> surprise questions, quiz-show questions),
>
>One of my bugbears is treating quizshows as echoes.
Why is that?  Do echo questions and quiz-show questions behave differently?
I've never really thought about it.

>> in which the wh-phrase is not fronted, do not obey
>> the same kinds of locality constraints as regular wh-questions, where the
>> wh-phrase is fronted.  This suggests that things like the Coordinate
>> Structure Constraint are constraints on movement per se, rather than, say,
>> constraints on embedding/processing/whatever.
>
>Quite so. My second sentence is Quizshow, and this would therefore
>suggest that LF/covert movement is not, strictly speaking, movement, in
>English at least.
Either that, or there simply is no covert movement in quiz-show
questions.

>BTW, I have thought about your point (that there is clear functional
>motivation for violations of the CSC and hence the CSC has to be seen
>as positively motivated by nonfunctional principles), and I cannot
>muster any decent reasons for disagreeing with you...:)
Hurrah!  The first theoretical argument I've won in a long time!  :-)
Seriously, though:  I've always thought of the CSC as being a strangely
non-functional property of language.  The fact that I've stumped you
confirms my intuition, and justifies my continued use of this example.

Of course, the CSC by itself is hardly enough evidence by itself for
discarding a functionally-based theory of grammar.  It's possible
that the CSC is not positively motivated by anything--that it's
merely a side-effect of the complex interactions of essentially
functionalist constraints.  Recent work in Optimality Theory has
suggested that certain non-obvious properties of phonology can
be explained rather elegantly by invoking the interaction of
mutually contradictory constraints (of the 'ease of articulation'
versus 'ease of perception' variety).  It's not inconceivable that
non-obvious properties of syntax, like the CSC, could be explained
in the same way.

Matt.