John sent Mary a book for Smith

[Geoffrey S. Nathan]

At 11:51 PM 4/29/98 PDT, Martin Kay wrote:

>For me, the hotel is OK, but not S
>
>I have had difficulty persuading my conative speakers that a teacher might
>say to a pupil
>        I want you to take me your mother this note
>Maybe the subscribers to this list are more liberal.
>
>--Martin Kay
>

Precisely this issue came up in a basic syntax course I was teaching many
years ago, using the first edition of the Radford text.  An American
Structuralist colleague (who shall remain nameless, but he was famous once)
suggested that the reason that Radford (and I) could not accept:

*Which car did you put Mary in the garage?

was due to the fact that I (and Chomsky) came from an immigrant background
(!!!!) and that we hadn't been exposed to the whole range of American
dialects.  It turned out that he could get an ethical dative reading for
'Mary' in that sentence.  He had no coherent answer for why Radford had
equal trouble with it, except, presumably for the fact that he had been
somehow influenced by Chomsky.  My colleague, who was from the hill country
of Kentucky, claimed that such sentences were just fine.  The rest of the
class consisted of non-native speakers, who were, to put it mildly,
bewildered.

Geoff

[Sociological footnote--I, like Chomsky, am Jewish.  And, like him, my
ancestors immigrated from Eastern Europe in the latter half of the 19th
century.  My colleague was, I assume, alluding to this fact--he claimed
that most of generative grammar was based on such dubious grammaticality
judgments.  His comments speak for themselves.]

[Grammatical footnote:  His intended interpretation was
Which car did you put in the garage for Mary.]

Geoffrey S. Nathan
Department of Linguistics
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale,
Carbondale, IL, 62901 USA
Phone:  +618 453-3421 (Office)   FAX +618 453-6527
+618 549-0106 (Home)