Re: "Difficult" clauses

For those who do not accept the dogma of Chomskyan deep structure,
words that are not there, are not there -- there may be a meaningful
relationship between some sentences that contain "that" and some
other sentences that do not contain it -- and then again, there may
not be. It's possible to analyze such relations without assuming the
existence of "unrealized morphemes." I it even more irritating when
the argument that an invisible constituent exists is a theory-
internal requirement that all phrases have a "head" of a particular
kind. Read van Valin and LaPolla for language analyses that don't
include the notion of a "VP", for instance.

Unlike some of the old-fashioned structuralists, I'm not opposed to
to syntactic analyses that posit "invisible structures", but I think
that Chomsky's school is slowly having to answer for the profligacy
with which they invented such items. It was Chomsky's "Aspects"
taught in a dogmatic way that made me abandon linguistics as an
undergraduate.

I suspect I make a better computer scientist than I would have a
linguist, but I never got over my disgust with grammatical theories
that reach Turing-completeness and _still_ need features added to
them to fix the elegance of their analysis. For the less-geeky, that
means that the TG grammar mechanisms have enough power that one can't
necessarily determine that a sentence is ungrammatical even with
infinite time available -- and they still weren't elegant.

Since he seems to have given up formal theories and moved into the
"minimalist program" I have been unable to tell if he's advocating a
testable theory any more. Fortunately I don't have to...

It's generally not safe in this forum to assume that people subscribe
to any particular brand of theory, perhaps particularly "generative"
ones.

Mark Line used to defend the structuralist observational line of
argument pretty well here.

   -- David


On May 14, 2007, at 7:42 PM, MorphemeAddict@WMCONNECT.COM wrote:

> In a message dated 5/14/2007 2:52:13 PM Central Daylight Time,
> aquamarine_demon@YAHOO.COM writes:
>
>
>>>> I think you missed my point.  If a word is implied, then it's
>>>> not there,
>> even if it could be there.  Adding a word that will not be there
>> isn't
>> really adding anything.
>>
>> In English,
>> it's possible for a speaker to omit the complementizer "that";
>> however, it is
>> still there in the deep structure of a sentence, because it is the
>> head of
>> the complementizer phrase, and you can't have a phrase without a
>> head. So yes,
>> it is still there, even if it's not part of the actual spoken
>> sample (because
>> listeners still insert a "that" when interpreting the sentence).
>>
>
> Whether the "that" is explicit or implicit is not really the
> issue.  For one
> thing, you can't arbitrarily insert "that" wherever you want.  As
> you say,
> it's part of the deep structure.
>
> stevo   </HTML>

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