Trees, pheno, tectogrammar

[Tibor Kiss]

Hi,

a very specific remark to Carl's recent comment:

> I agree the right way to think of syntactic derivations is as proofs,
> though I don't think it is essential that the logic be substructural:
> if you take Curry's advice (as Dowty, Reape, Kathol etc. did) to
> separate purely combinatorial aspects of syntax
> ("tectogrammatical" structure)
> from how syntactic entities "surface" ("phonegrammatical"
> structure) then
> you can just use ordinary (intuitionistic) propositional logic for the
> derivations.

Separating tectogrammar (combination->interpretation) from phenogrammar
leads to the assumption that linear re-ordering does not have effects on
meaning. A version of this view also seems to be endorsed by MP people, and
earlier by GB people who assumed that extraposition and scrambling are to be
handled as phonological operations. (The last time I came across such an
idea, but in the context of verb-second, is Reuland's (2001) paper on
Binding.)

BUT: This assumption is clearly wrong for a wide variety of dislocation
operations, such as extraposition and scrambling. For extraposition, this
has already been discussed in Culicover/Rochemont (1990), and my _Semantic
Constraints on Relative Clause Extraposition_ is almost entirely devoted to
promote the view that extraposition has semantic effects and is constrained
by rules of interpretation (earlier views in the same direction are
Wittenburg 1987 and Stucky 1987, both in Syntax and Semantics 20).

For scrambling, the effects on quantification and variable binding are
dramatic (and have been completely ignored in e.g. Kathol's thesis).

To cut a long story short: Separating tectogrammar from phenogrammar does
not work.

Best

Tibor

------------------------------------------
Prof. Dr. Tibor Kiss
Sprachwissenschaftliches Institut - Ruhr-Universität Bochum
+49-234-3225114 // +49-177-7468265


------------------------------------------
Prof. Dr. Tibor Kiss
Sprachwissenschaftliches Institut - Ruhr-Universität Bochum
+49-234-3225114 // +49-177-7468265